Last update - 00:00 02/03/2008
Hillary Clinton comes out swinging as Ohio primary nears
Race for the White House: The harder Clinton tries, the more the voters run the other way.
By Shmuel Rosner, Haaretz Correspondent
OHIO - Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni does not yet know which of the U.S. presidential primary candidates she will meet when she visits the United States in 10 days. It is hard to plan such encounters when no one knows whether by the time she arrives, Hillary Clinton will be history, and Barack Obama and John McCain will be the official candidates. How can anyone know? On March 11, Mississippi goes to the polls, and if the battle is not decided by then, the candidates will still be busy campaigning when Livni lands in Washington.
The Ohio primary is set for Tuesday, and interest in it grows with every passing day. Absentee voters have shown a historic interest in the contest. In the 2000 primaries, about 10,000 votes were cast before election day. In the 2004 primaries the number was 9,500. This year, in the Cincinnati area alone, 40,000 people filed for absentee ballots. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said Friday that she expected a 52-percent voter turnout rate for the primaries. That is only 1 percent less than the turnout for the 2006 gubernatorial elections, which usually sees many more people than the primaries do.
In 2006, Democrat Ted Strickland was elected governor of Ohio, after a series of scandals that embarrassed the Republican party there. Strickland is a Hillary Clinton supporter - and is supposed to be doing for her what Florida Governor Charlie Crist did for McCain. When McCain beat Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney in Florida, that was his great leap forward. A Clinton win Tuesday will bring her back a measure of relevancy. Meanwhile, Crist has been mentioned as a Republican vice-presidential candidate, while Strickland has been mentioned as Clinton's potential running-mate.
But first, she has to win. That is what Strickland is trying to remind voters with his new TV spot: "We need a president, first of all who's going to be a fighter," he tells viewers.
Clinton is certainly that. But the accursed opinion polls show that the harder she tries, the more the voters run the other way. Last week, an American Research Group poll showed Clinton leading Obama by 49 percent to 39 percent. On Sunday, SurveyUSA showed 50 percent to 44 percent in Clinton's favor. By Friday, a Zogby poll showed the numbers were at 44 percent for Clinton and 42 percent for Obama.
Clinton has the money for more TV ads. In February, after a short-term economic crisis, she got back on her usual track of more than $30 million a month in contributions. However, that might not be enough: Obama raised $50 million this month and he is also flooding Ohio, as well as Texas, which also goes to the polls Tuesday, with TV spots and with volunteers canvassing neighborhoods and small towns, handing out flyers.
Cleveland's Jewish community is also torn between the two candidates. It will have a chance to gauge them as their supporters face off at a debate today: Congressman Adam Schiff from California will speak for Obama, and Congressman Anthony D. Weiner from New York, for Clinton. Both are Jewish, and they are to appear at an event sponsored by the Israel Project and the Cleveland Jewish News.
Obama himself courted Cleveland's Jews last week at a function, where he presented his platform at length and responded to questions and claims that have dogged his campaign.
Clinton's camp will be playing up those claims and questions both overtly and covertly. A Clinton TV ad, aired in Texas, shows a phone ringing in a household as children sleep. "It's 3 A.M.," the voice-over says. Viewers are then asked who they would want to answer the phone if the call was warning of a world crisis at hand. They are expected to respond Clinton- the more experienced of the two candidates. The message comes across without mentioning Obama's name. This will probably be McCain's message in the presidential campaign - that Obama just does not have the experience to be the commander-in-chief.
Clinton is not the only one intimating that Obama does not understand the global reality that decides presidential moves. On Thursday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Straff, Admiral Mike Mullen, announced that he was worried about a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. The army, neutral as it may be, does not like the Democratic candidate's pledges on Iraq.
A Pew Research Center poll showed Thursday that 43 percent of voters are concerned that Obama is not "tough enough" to handle U.S. foreign policy. Aware of the numbers, Obama last week told voters: "The notion that this is somehow a precipitous withdrawal that I'm proposing just isn't borne out by facts."