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Clinton, McCain begin to emerge

BY CRAIG GORDON | craig.gordon@newsday.com

12:03 AM EST, January 20, 2008

Republican presidential hopeful, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., celebrates with supporters after his South Carolina presidential primary election win at The Citadel in Charleston, S.C. (AP Photo / January 19, 2008)

WASHINGTON - In a topsy-turvy year like this, two wins are enough for a tail wind.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain each emerge from their second victories in two weeks with a claim to front-runner status -- even though both nominating contests remain fluid and unsettled heading into a Feb. 5 mega-primary.

Both candidates put down important markers with their victories -- Clinton decisively in Nevada, McCain more .narrowly in South Carolina.

They stepped up the pressure on their opponents to score meaningful victories -- and soon -- or perhaps look back on yesterday as the day when the White House race in 2008 started to take shape.

That hurdle is especially high for Democrat Barack Obama, whose expected win in South Carolina next Saturday probably won't be enough to catapult him back into the front of a race he once seemed to own after Iowa.

"The onus now shifts to him to demonstrate that he's electable, and I wonder if he's going to be able to do that," said Michael Fauntroy, a George Mason University professor who has studied African-American voting patterns. "At some point, he's going to have to put some wins in some places that actually matter."

Electability has been former mayor Rudy Giuliani's calling card -- but another pair of sixth-place finishes in Nevada (with 4 percent) and South Carolina (2 percent) may leave voters in his do-or-die state of Florida wondering why.

The marquee races for both parties now diverge. Democrats go to South Carolina on Saturday, where African-Americans make up half the Democratic voters. Republicans go to Florida Jan. 29, where McCain believes his war-hero persona will play well against Giuliani's 9/11 sheen.

It was only two weeks ago in Iowa that the campaigns were focused on the message of change and the need for fresh faces like Obama and Mike Huckabee.

But the contests yesterday suggest that voters are reverting to old habits, turning to longtime partisans in Clinton and McCain with an eye toward the tried-and-true and electability come November.

On the Republican side, it's harder for McCain to claim a strong victory -- he barely edged Huckabee, who pulled in a close second place on the power of evangelical Christian voters who turned out for the one-time Southern Baptist preacher.

That shows that the battle for the heart of the Republican Party is, quite literally, a battle for its soul -- though Huckabee has yet to prove that he can win without the help of evangelical Christian voters who are in shorter supply in key Feb. 5 states.

Four in 10 white evangelicals and regular churchgoers supported Huckabee yesterday, while McCain did well with moderates, older voters and people looking for a candidate with the right experience.

Even Mitt Romney can claim a victory yesterday, in the little-watched Nevada Republican caucuses. But South Carolina was the real GOP prize, and his distant fourth-place showing there spells big trouble.

Romney scored his third win yesterday in Nevada. But his wins came in a state where no one paid attention (Wyoming), a state where he was born (Michigan), and a state where fully half of his votes came from fellow Mormons (Nevada), making it hard for him to claim any national following.

On the Democratic side, Nevada was downright ugly, marked by charges of racial insensitivity and voter intimidation, but Clinton proved her narrow New Hampshire win was no fluke -- and in turn made Obama's Iowa victory seem like a long-ago .exception, not the rule.

And for all the talk about pushing race out of the Democratic fight, there it was on the caucus floors yesterday in Nevada -- Clinton won Hispanic voters 2-to-1 outside the casino caucus sites, while Obama won black voters 4-to-1. The sometimes ugly racial politics that reared its head last week might not be going away soon as the race moves to South Carolina.