Remember how most pundits wrote the conventional wisdom: that Senator Hillary Clinton was ahead by double digits in Pennsylvania and was expected to win big against her chief rival Senator Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary?
Even with the furor over Obama’s comments about small-town Americans being bitter and clinging, the conventional wisdom is that (a) Clinton should win big and (b) especially now with this controversy she should win a victory that is more than any old margin of victory.
But now a Clinton supporter has abruptly moved the goal post to the last five words of the last paragraph:
Ellen Malcolm, founder of the EMILY’s List group that’s making a major push to elect Democrat Hillary Clinton to the White House, says Clinton “has to win” Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary but any margin will do.
At a breakfast today with USA TODAY and Gannett News Service, Malcolm said the state is a test for whether Barack Obama can “close the deal” with white working-class voters. She tried to lower expectations for Clinton there.
“It’s astonishing to me that she’s doing as well as she is” when Obama is outspending her five-to-one on TV, Malcolm said of the former first lady and New York senator. “If she can pull off a win at all, that’s an incredible victory.”
So if Hillary Clinton wins by 3 or 4 points or 5 or 6 when she months ago (and even now in some polls) she was ahead by double digits, expect to hear the argument that no matter what her margin of victory Obama is unelectable.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.