Candidates of marginal support

Michael Barone:

What makes this presidential election different from all other presidential elections? And different from what we expected when the year began?

First, neither party's presumptive nominee was chosen by massive support from primary voters, as John Kerry was in 2004, George W. Bush in 2000 or Bill Clinton in 1992.

That may not seem obvious in the case of John McCain, who effectively clinched the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5. But look at the numbers: In January, McCain won New Hampshire 37 percent to 32 percent, South Carolina 33 to 30 percent and Florida 36 to 31 percent. On Super Tuesday, he won more than 50 percent only in states that were essentially uncontested: Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. He won Missouri by only 33 percent to 32 percent and California by only 42 percent to 35 percent, but won big delegate margins because of Republicans' winner-take-all rules.

McCain's strategy from July 2007 was to count on the other Republican candidates' strategies to fail. That was risky. But it worked. Republicans have accepted his victory because they're temperamentally inclined to fall in line and because it became obvious that he was the candidate with the best chance to win in the fall. But McCain was not really a consensus choice.

As for Barack Obama, at this writing he leads Hillary Clinton by 153 in "pledged delegates," those chosen in primaries and caucuses. But about 90 percent of this lead -- between 130 and 140 delegates -- came in caucuses, where the enthusiasm of his followers and the inexplicable failure of the Clinton campaign to mobilize hers gave him big victories.

We know from the nonbinding "beauty contest" primaries in Washington in February and in Nebraska on May 13 that Obama would have won much smaller margins in primaries in those states -- and much smaller delegate margins, thanks to the Democrats' proportional representation rules.

Democratic super-delegates, given votes in the 1980s to counterbalance the enthusiasm of left-wing caucus-goers, have instead moved toward ratifying the results of the caucuses and the paper-thin delegate edge Obama won in primary states. They may have good reasons for doing so -- fearing a Clinton loss in the general or a backlash from black voters if the first serious black candidate is rejected. But Obama, like McCain, is not the consensus choice of a large majority of Democratic primary voters.

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Another way this election has been different from any other since 1960 is that neither money nor the thing it mostly buys -- television advertising -- has made much difference. Obama has been a prodigious fundraiser, raising unheard of sums over the Internet. But his money advantage didn't enable him to close the deal and beat Hillary Clinton in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania or Indiana.

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The money issue is good news for McCain since he clearly will be outspent this fall. As good a fund raiser as President Bush was, he was also outspent in 2004 with the left wing 527s making a substantial contribution to Kerry.

McCain won because two thirds of the vote was split among more conservative candidates. Obama has won by winning states he will not carry in the fall and by having more intensity at the caucuses. Since the election in November will not be done by caucus, the value of that intensity will probably be diluted. The Democrats would have been wiser to do away with the caucuses and go with winner take all primaries.

Hillary lost the election when she could not give a straight answer to a question about giving illegals a drivers license. It demonstrated a wishy washy approach to an issue that was important to voters, if not to her. The iron is that Obama was even worse on the answer, but he managed to focus the debate on her back and worth rather than his own pander to people who can't vote.