Democrats gear up for seven-game series
Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, March 12, 2008

People who tire of sports metaphors have my understanding, if not always
my sympathy. Even so, watching overwrought Democrats carry on about the
extended presidential primary season, it was my wife, a baseball and
basketball coach’s daughter, who wondered, “Haven’t any of these people
ever seen a seven-game series?” Exactly. Take my favorite ever, the 2004
American League Championship Series. Baseball fans already know where
I’m going with this. With the Boston Red Sox down three games to none, I
was determined to ride Game 4 out to the bitter end. It wasn’t like I’d
never seen a Yankees victory celebration before. Bill Mueller was coming
up in the ninth. He figured to get on base. Anything could still happen.
Anything did. Mueller drove in the tying run, Big Papi hit a walk-off
shot in the 12th, and the Red Sox ended up winning the ALCS and sweeping
the World Series. That was the year Curt Schilling, my kind of
Republican, pitched Game 6 with an ankle tendon sutured in place and his
shoe filling with blood.

See, here’s the thing about sports fans: We know the rules, we know how
the game’s scored, and we know it ain’t over until it’s over. We have
little patience for dilettantes who don’t. Would that overwrought
political pundits and Barack Obama supporters, to come to the point,
understood those things.

Some, including respected friends such as Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter,
were calling for Hillary Clinton to withdraw even before her big Game 5
wins in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island. Alter’s reasoning was that there
was no way she could catch up in the delegate count; hence, she was only
hurting Democrats by staying in the race. The problem is that Obama
appears equally unlikely to win enough elected delegates to win the
contest outright.

A lead’s only a lead, sports fans, until the final out.

Game 6 will be played in Pennsylvania, which strikes many Obama
supporters as manifestly unfair. On his Newsweek politics blog, Andrew
Romano endorses the reasoning of one “maggie 22,” who argues that “[t]he
media isn’t choosing to focus on the uncertain contests. It’s choosing
to focus on the contests where Clinton should win. Pennsylvania... has
an Ohio demographic and the added handicap for Obama of being a closed
primary.... The only difference between PA and MS is that Clinton has
succeeded in convincing the media that the states that matter are the
ones that she happens to have an advantage in.”

As “22” may indicate Maggie’s age, let’s go easy on her. The most
obvious difference between “PA” and “MS” can be expressed as a football
score: 21-6. Not a blowout, but decisive. I’m speaking of electoral
votes, according to which Pennsylvania’s exactly 3.5 times more
important than Mississippi. Then, too, Mississippi voted 60-40 percent
for President Bush in 2004. It’s a lead-pipe cinch to vote Republican
come November. No bookie would take the bet.

So yeah, Pennsylvania, a must-win swing state for Democrats, is far more
important—this year and every year. It’s also more important than a
bunch of states that Obama has won—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama,
Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, North Dakota, etc. —so when the candidate himself,
a Harvard Law graduate, talks about how he’s won more states than
Clinton, he knows he’s blowing smoke. Giving you the old “Okie-Doke,” as
he likes to tell black audiences.

I’m sure Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson knows it, too.

“To paraphrase Orwell,” he wrote recently, “some states are more equal
than others.” He and Keith Olbermann had a wonderful time pretending
amazement at this bewilderingly complex “Clintonian” argument on
“Countdown.”

“Could it be,” Bob Somerby asks at The Daily Howler, “because two
million Democrats voted in Ohio last week—and roughly ten thousand did
so in Wyoming?” (Wyoming voted 70-30 Republican in 2004.)

Unless Obama pulls an upset in Pennsylvania, this thing’s going seven,
by which I mean Florida and Michigan, two more crucial swing states that
Democrats need come November. Do-over primaries are mandatory between
now and the Democratic convention. To date, both campaigns have
resisted, Clinton’s because her (insupportable) position is that she’s
already won them, Obama’s because he (secretly) fears that he can’t. No
other alternative will be seen as fair. Think of them as rescheduled
rain outs. And if nobody’s won after seven? Well, the rules say the
super delegates get to decide. And when they do, they’ll be looking at
the stats, such as Obama losing 83 of Ohio’s 88 counties; the fact that
so far Clinton has won states totaling 263 electoral votes to Obama’s
193; or which one polls ahead of the GOP nominee, Sen. John McCain, and
where. Meanwhile, fans hyperventilate. Recently, I’ve seen Clinton
called “monstrous,” a “zombie,” and a “fratricidal maniac,” and Obama’s
supporters derided as “cultists” and “latte-sipping airheads.” My
advice? Calm down, everybody, it’s a long season.

—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and
recipient of the National Magazine Award.
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