Hillary Clinton Clings In As ‘white Flight’ Begins To Harm Barack Obama

On the eve of two crucial primary election contests, Hillary Clinton is pinning her hopes of winning the Democratic presidential nomination on a collapse in the white vote for Barack Obama.

“White flight” from Obama, who was hailed as the first post-racial presidential candidate, has been gathering force since Clinton’s nine-point victory in last month’s Pennsylvania primary.

Her allies will be looking at voting patterns in Indiana and North Carolina on Tuesday, the two largest remaining states to go to the polls, for any signs that Obama’s proven weakness among white working-class voters may turn into a rout.

Clinton is campaigning with fresh confidence that she has a plausible path to the nomination, despite trailing Obama in states won and delegates pledged to support her at the Democratic national convention this summer. She has already beaten him among white, non-college-educated voters in 26 out of 29 states, according to exit polls.

If Obama’s support among the white working class reaches new lows, Clinton believes she can persuade a majority of superdelegates – the party officials with a casting vote at the convention – to back her. The risk is that this would mean trampling on the wishes of African-American voters, a vital part of any winning coalition for Democrats in a presidential election.

Clinton trails Obama by 135 delegates, with a total of 2,024 needed to clinch the nomination. So far the traffic has been against her. Superdelegates have been breaking in Obama’s direction by nine to one since Super Tuesday in February, when nearly half the states in America voted.

Obama needs to perform only adequately on Tuesday, perhaps losing Indiana by a small margin and winning North Carolina convincingly, for his path to the nomination to appear assured.

However, Jerome Segovia, a superdelegate who has yet to endorse a candidate, told The Sunday Times that if Clinton could narrow the delegate gap to below 100 in the remaining eight contests, superdelegates would feel free to vote with their conscience and back her.

Segovia, a member of the Democratic party’s powerful rules committee, which could play a key role at the convention in the event of a near-tie, is leaning towards Clinton after initially favouring the Illinois senator.

“Obama has got to be 100 delegates ahead of Clinton by the end of the race. If he is, it would be perceived as undemocratic to back her. Anything under 100 delegates is effectively a tie and it would be seen as reasonable to support Hillary,” he said.

It would require a dramatic fall-off in support for Obama in the remaining primaries for Clinton to reach that figure, but it is not impossible.

Last week’s rantings by his former pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, about American-sponsored terrorism and the US government’s supposed role in spreading Aids as a form of black genocide, have helped to drive white working-class voters away from Obama.

Rachel Smith, 24, a young mother and Clinton supporter, said at a diner in Brownsburg, Indiana: “White people are giving up on Obama. Most of my family members are leaning towards Hillary. It’s because of Reverend Wright. You just can’t ignore him. He’s putting the last nail in Obama’s coffin.”

After a barrage of negative publicity for Obama, the polls are recording a sharp swing towards Clinton. In Indiana, where Obama was once tied or briefly ahead, two recent polls show a seven to 10-point lead for her. In North Carolina, a new poll shows the extent of white flight, particularly among undecided voters. Clinton’s advantage over Obama among white voters has risen from nine to 23 points in a month.

During the same period, Obama’s 23-point lead in North Carolina has dwindled to nine points. Although he is still favoured to win the state, it may not deliver the resounding victory in the popular vote and delegate count that he is seeking to offset potentially heavy losses in the next round of primaries in the predominantly white, rural states of West Virginia on May 13 and Kentucky on May 20.

“This primary election on Tuesday is a game-changer,” Clinton said in Kinston, North Carolina. “This is going to make a huge difference in what happens going forward. The entire country – probably even a lot of the world – is looking to see what North Carolina decides.”

A Clinton adviser claimed that up to 75% of the roughly 300 undeclared superdelegates represented white working-class districts and may be susceptible to the argument that the New York senator is the more “electable” candidate to face John McCain, the Republican nominee, in November.

Bill Clinton, the former president, has been swinging through the hamlets of Indiana and North Carolina, speaking in village halls and from flatbed trucks, in a bid to win over every last small-town voter for Hillary.

In Indiana he held a rally attended by 900 people in Martinsville, a former hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan, where African-Americans seldom venture. In 1968 a black door-to-door saleswoman was killed with a screwdriver. The case was only solved in 2002, when a woman stepped forward and said she was seven when she saw her father commit the murder.

The former president has been playing up the “Bubba” factor on the stump – his ability to connect with small-town voters. After being accused of deploying the “race card” against Obama in South Carolina, he has been criticising his wife’s opponent for being elitist.

“The great divide in this country is not by race or even income,” the former president said at a campaign stop. “It’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules.”

Hillary Clinton has been stressing her homespun values and religious beliefs, in contrast to Wright’s off-the-wall doctrines. At a meeting in Brownsburg on National Prayer Day, she told the audience she had just come from a prayer meeting with local ministers. “I am sustained and strengthened every day by my faith,” she said. A Clinton official vehemently denied that high-lighting her “electability” was code for drawing attention to Obama’s declining support among whites. “No, no, no – not even close,” the official said. “It is about who is best able to take on John McCain and the Republicans.”

However, Obama urgently needs to prevent white flight from escalating out of control. At a rally attended by 10,000 people in Bloomington, Indiana, he sought to allay voters’ concerns.

“Because we’ve been so successful, my opponents have been trying to make this election about me,” he said. “ ‘We’re not sure he shares our values. We haven’t seen him wear a flag pin lately. He’s got a funny name. He says he’s Christian but we don’t know. His former pastor said some terrible things, and so, can we really trust this guy?’ ” Obama has cut down on sports-stadium-size rallies and increased the number of small local gatherings in an attempt to show voters that he is one of them, but Clinton is packing in almost double the number of events and appears to be more energised.

At an open-air meeting on education with Obama and his wife, Michelle, in a park in Indianapolis, Ann Bilodeau, 47, a speech therapist, said the Obamas came across as “very down-home, very Midwest people”. The controversy over Wright had put Obama in a “difficult situation”, she said, “but I think he will rise above it, I really do”.

However, Bilodeau recalled working in the 1980s for the election of Dan Quayle, a young Indiana senator who went on to become vice-president under the first President George Bush, and who tried hard to be a model politician. “He didn’t like wearing his wedding ring, although he was devoted to his wife. He got infections from it, but he had to wear it,” she said. Today all he is remembered for is misspelling “potatoe” before a group of schoolchildren. It finished his career.

American elections can be particularly brutal. George Allen, an early favourite to win the Republican presidential nomination two years ago, lost his seat in the Senate in 2006 after being caught on tape calling a young Indian man “macaca”, an apparent racial slur. Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, spent a year topping the polls but crashed and burned when he failed to win a single Republican presidential primary this year.

On the other hand, Bill Clinton, the “comeback kid”, bounced back from crises over dodging the Vietnam draft and news of his affair with Gennifer Flowers, a nightclub singer, during his first election campaign in 1992.

Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Popularity is ephemeral. Obama has taken a tremendous hit. He is still in pretty good shape for the nomination, but it is building up into a great problem for the Democrats in the general election.”

Sabato said Obama’s steady personality should help him weather the crisis. “He’s emotionally stable. As he himself said, his highs are not too high and his lows are not too low. Generally speaking, stable politicians don’t implode.”

Clinton will keep trying to derail him until the last primaries are held on June 3, just in case.

Her campaign team is heavily courting superdelegates behind the scenes and may have more waverers in her camp than current reports suggest, despite some high-profile endorsements of Obama last week.

Segovia said he had heard little from the Obama campaign, but had recently had an hour-long meeting with Clinton and a handful of other undeclared superdelegates. “She was impressive,” he said.

Segovia is monitoring the popular vote tallies closely and could have a crucial say on the rules committee in determining whether the votes of Florida and Michigan primaries are counted – a decision that could give Clinton an edge.

The states were disqualified from sending delegates to the convention because they defied party rules by holding their contests early. Clinton won both states convincingly, although Obama’s name was not even on the ballot in Michigan.

If Clinton can narrow the delegate gap and lead the popular vote, Segovia is prepared to risk the wrath of African-American voters and support her as the nominee. Either candidate would make history. “You could say she is the first woman candidate to get as far as she has, so it doesn’t bother me.”

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