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WASHINGTON — Whether or not they asked for it, Americans are now in the midst of a six-month presidential election race.
Arizona Senator John McCain and Illinois Senator Barack Obama traded barbs over Iran yesterday, while blithely disregarding Hillary Clinton's continuing presence as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Mr. McCain castigated Mr. Obama for his willingness to hold direct talks with Iran's leadership without preconditions, saying it “betrays the depth of Senator Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment.”
Mr. Obama struck back within hours.
mocratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., casts a shadow as she speaks during a campaign rally at the home of Eddie and Robin Clark in Prestonsburg, Ky., Monday, May 19, 2008. (Elise Amendola/AP)
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“The reason Iran is so much more powerful now than it was a few years ago is because of the Bush/McCain policy of fighting an endless war in Iraq and refusing to pursue direct diplomacy with Iran,” he told supporters at a rally in Montana.
“They're the ones who have not dealt with Iran wisely.”
Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and Mr. Obama, who is on the cusp of that status on the Democrats' side, appear to be in tacit agreement in ignoring Ms. Clinton and focusing exclusively on each other, despite the fact she is expected to win the Kentucky primary by a wide margin today.
Some polls even have her running neck and neck with Mr. Obama in Oregon, which also votes today, even though he managed to attract an awe-inspiring crowd of 75,000 at a rally there on Sunday.
“This is nowhere near over,” Ms. Clinton insisted at a rally in Maysville, Ky., yesterday.
“I'm going to make my case and I'm going to make it until we have a nominee, but we're not going to have one today and we're not going to have one tomorrow and we're not going to have one the next day,” she predicted.
Ms. Clinton was reacting to the decision of Mr. Obama to greet today's primary results in Iowa, which opened this primary and caucus season back on Jan. 3, three lifetimes ago.
Mr. Obama is going to Iowa because he expects to celebrate a milestone tonight, obtaining an absolute majority of the pledged delegates (not counting the disqualified delegations from Florida and Michigan). That's not enough, without more superdelegate support, to clinch the nomination, but it brings him very close.
In an effort to minimize that milestone, the Clinton campaign issued a memorandum yesterday, accusing Mr. Obama of premature celebration.
Evoking President George W. Bush's hubristic declaration of success in Iraq from the deck of an aircraft carrier, the Clinton campaign team warned that “premature victory laps and false declarations of victory are unwarranted. Declaring mission accomplished does not make it so.”
Yet every day, more supers drift to Mr. Obama's side, the most prominent yesterday being the venerable Robert Byrd, 90, the longest-serving member in the history of the Senate. (He first took his seat in 1959.)
Going into today's primaries, Mr. Obama leads Ms. Clinton by 167 pledged delegates and 22 superdelegates, according to the RealClearPolitics tally, an insurmountable lead by any realistic measure. He is within about 120 delegate votes of a first-ballot victory at the Democratic National Convention.
That is why Mr. Obama is now spending much of his campaigning time in states that Democrats hope to win or hold in the general election, rather than in Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana, which will hold primaries June 1 and 3. From Iowa, for example, he proceeds to Florida.
The shape of the presidential race has been getting clearer for some time. On foreign policy, Mr. McCain will accuse Mr. Obama of pursuing policies of appeasement through inexperience. Mr. Obama will remind voters that Mr. McCain supports the unpopular war in Iraq.
On the economy, Mr. McCain will accuse Mr. Obama of wanting to raise taxes in order to impose statist health care on unwilling voters; Mr. Obama will trumpet his health-care plan and remind voters that Mr. McCain once opposed George Bush's tax cuts.
More than anything else, though, Mr. Obama will seek to link Mr. McCain to Mr. Bush, who is establishing new benchmarks for presidential unpopularity.
“John McCain has decided to run for George Bush's third term and we can't afford it,” Mr. Obama said yesterday. He says it every day.
Hillary Clinton will continue to inject herself into this debate, asserting that she, rather than Barack Obama, is best suited to making the Democratic argument.
But her greatest challenge, right now, is to get her political opponents to mention her name.
