Fifteen hours into her day, Hillary Clinton still wasn’t sitting down. The plane she charters tilted downward and staffers were urgently whispering, “We’re landing,”. But Clinton kept going. She had hit her stride in this 10 p.m. press conference Monday, which was unfolding en route to her fifth campaign stop of the day in Evansville, Indiana’s third largest city. With Indiana Senator Evan Bayh next to her, Clinton struck the populist chords she has hit especially hard lately, railing against special interests and defending her gas tax plan as a salve for suffering working people. “Folks really respect it if you get up and fight, even if you can’t on the first, second, or third time produce all the results that you would like to,” she said, when a reporter asked her if her plan to pass gas tax legislation was realistic. “What’s the alternative…Oil (at) $120 a barrel? For goodness sakes. That deserves some kind of response and I don’t hear anything coming out of…”
Clinton’s staff cut her off and attempted to pull her back to her seat mid-sentence as the plane bucked and banked its way down to the ground. The senator ignored them, saying, “McCain has a plan–take the gas tax off. Republicans would vote for that. That is not a responsible position. I think I’ve offered a responsible position and it’s worth standing up and fighting for it, which is what I’m doing.”
Clinton’s pugilistic late-night commentary aboard her plane is an apt metaphor for the state of her overall campaign today. Many voters–and most pundits-seem ready for the Democratic nomination marathon to end. But Clinton shows no signs of sitting down. In fact, there are new signals that Clinton will continue her battle regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s voting. Her campaign web site yesterday posted a new disclaimer on its delegate-tracking page. For months the conventional wisdom has held that 2,025 delegates are needed to secure the nomination. Howard Wolfson, a Clinton spokesman, told Newsweek the campaign believes 2,208 delegates are required to secure the nomination because “as we get closer to the end of the primary contests we wanted to make it clear that Florida and Michigan need to be included in the delegate calculus.”
As her fight to stay alive intensifies, Clinton has been ratcheting up her use of populist rhetoric. Yesterday, in New Albany, Indiana, a small city nestled against the Ohio River on the Kentucky border where about 15 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, Clinton closed her rally with a spirited attack on the special interests she says are profiting from the sweat of working-class Americans. Standing in a firehouse with a squad of firefighters behind her, a noticeably hoarse yet remarkably energized Clinton yelled, “It’s the highest cost for oil in the history of the world! More than $120 a barrel. We are literally over the barrel…There is no doubt in my mind that there is market manipulation going on.” She went on to assail rogue energy traders who “sit behind a computer” and buy and sell oil to “keep it off the market” and increase prices.
Clinton said if she becomes president she’ll target speculators, change anti-trust laws to go after OPEC, and make oil companies give some of “their record profits” to working people in the form of a gas tax holiday. The vilification of big oil, Wall Street and OPEC has become her mantra. Deputy Communications Director Phil Singer yesterday sent reporters an email alerting them to Clinton’s pledge at a firehouse in Merrillville, Indiana to “go right at OPEC” and make sure they can no longer “get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world” to set oil prices.
Robert Lieber, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown and the author of two books on the 1970s oil crisis, said Clinton’s comments distort reality. While OPEC and speculators may be partially responsible for the run up in gas prices, Lieber said, it will be difficult for Clinton to do anything about it with world demand peaking–thanks to the emergence of China and India as superpowers and scientific constraints on new oil production. “There is a kernel of truth in the things she’s said, but the way it has been framed is political and involves considerable exaggeration and hyperbole,” Lieber said. “It is populist rhetoric.”
Maybe, but it just might work. Eleventh-hour polls suggest Clinton will defeat Obama by a decent margin in Indiana, and may keep it close in North Carolina. The kinds of details Lieber delves into-and that Obama discusses on the stump-might make for sound policy, but they don’t move the political needle. Take Melvin Mitchell, a 72-year-old retired postal employee who stood waiting for two hours to hear Clinton speak in New Albany. Mitchell says he spends about $40 extra a week on gas now, which is keeping him from spending money on anything but true necessities. “I’m struggling,” Mitchell said. “I worked hard my whole life. Why should I have to struggle?” Janice Wiggs, 59, was standing next to him, with her 81-year-old mother in tow (the elderly woman also stood for about two hours waiting for Clinton). Wiggs said Clinton’s gas tax plan would save her $28 a month. “Obama’s saying $28 isn’t much,” she angrily remarked. “I think he needs to get in touch. $28 buys a lot of groceries.”
