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Clinton, Obama race for nod as McCain pulls ahead

BY CRAIG GORDON | craig.gordon@newsday.com

February 3, 2008

WASHINGTON - With a boost from New York, John McCain is looking more certain than ever to become the Republican nominee after Tuesday's mega-mega-primary.

And the Democrats?

Not so fast.

Hillary Rodham Clinton still has a clear edge. But believe it or not, she and Barack Obama might be just getting started.

Political prognosticators who once pointed to a sprawling Super Tuesday to set the White House fight card now seem only half-right. McCain looks ready to knock Mitt Romney and two others out of the race altogether and begin trying to unite his fractured party.

But the night could produce a split decision on the Democratic side, one that keeps the race going at least until contests in Ohio and Texas a month away.

In other words, March 4 is the new Feb. 5.

"My prediction for Tuesday night is that both of them will claim victory," Clinton and Obama, said Jack Pitney of Claremont McKenna College in California, which is voting Tuesday as well.

Clinton wins more states, but Obama wins enough convention delegates to keep marching on. "I'd still rate Clinton as the favorite, but Obama's very close behind," Pitney said.

To be sure, Clinton goes into Tuesday's voting in New York and 21 other states with some clear advantages over Obama.

She's one of the most famous women in the world -- name recognition Obama is scrambling to match -- and she's got a bevy of endorsements, a bunch of money and a lifetime of political chits to cash in heading into the biggest primary day in American history, stretching from Montauk Point to Nome, Alaska.

As for Obama, "he's working against the clock here. People are warming to him. He's still growing. He's just running out of time to do stuff," said Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist not working for either side.

Obama does have something else -- momentum, or just call it being in the right place at the right time, being the fresh face when voters badly want one. A million-dollars-a-day haul last month didn't hurt.

But Obama's biggest advantage is Democratic party rules that parcel out convention delegates to both winner and loser in nearly all of the contests, very roughly based on their percentage of the vote. In other words, if Clinton carries a state by 55 percent to 45 percent, Obama still gets a sizable chunk of delegates.

So the march to the Democratic nomination becomes little more than a math problem -- who can win the 2,025 delegates needed to clinch. Nearly 1,700 so-called "pledged" delegates will be awarded Tuesday, with New York's 232 and California's 370.

Some Democrats are even looking all the way ahead to an April 22 primary in Pennsylvania to decide it all. On the other hand, others say that if Clinton started racking up so many states, it could put pressure on Obama to depart the race -- or vice versa.

That's in effect what's happening to McCain's rival, Mitt Romney, on the Republican side. After spending $35 million of his own money but losing in several key contests, it's looking more and more likely he won't be able to catch up to McCain.

Republicans offer winner-take-all delegates in about half the states, meaning the New York winner gets all the state's 101 delegates toward the needed 1,191. McCain can't win enough delegates Tuesday to reach that total.

McCain would inherit a party whose three wings have been torn apart this year -- national security conservatives who like him, fiscal conservatives who liked Romney and social conservatives who favored Mike Huckabee, also running on Tuesday.

The Arizona senator is an unlikely figure to reunite them -- and one lingering danger for him is that core conservatives band together behind Romney in a last-ditch effort to stop him. Social conservatives distrust McCain, and fiscal conservatives haven't forgiven him for opposing President George W. Bush's tax cuts.

But that's no more unlikely than McCain's own story this year, when he went from seeming political oblivion to the cusp of becoming his party's standard-bearer this fall.