THE CAMPAIGN SPECTATOR: Controlled Chaos

...Her campaign staff seized on the result as further evidence for their “electability” argument, demonstrating Obama’s inability to win over white working-class voters in the key swing states that will decide the November election...

...Ed Rendell...

...To most Americans, the name Ed Rendell conjures no magic, but the man is a hero to Pennsylvania Democrats, who leapt to their feet and cheered whenever he was introduced at Hillary’s rallies...

...Comeback chatter intensified the following week when Obama’s Chicago pastor, the Rev...

...Clinton was campaigning doggedly from one end of the Keystone State to the other and drawing enthusiastic crowds of Democrats who apparently paid no attention to the Beltway experts...

...This spin contained ample amounts of hype...

...Not only that, but many Clinton events featured the added excitement of Gov...

...What the national media seemed too cynical to see was how effectively Hillary used the celebrity factor in her Pennsylvania campaign...

...The purpose of Operation Chaos is not to secure the nomination of either of these two,” ever, when Obama scored big in North Carolina and her winning margin in Indiana was a slender two percentage points...

...Just about the time In Washington, experts continued counting the Beltway media decided that Obama had locked delegates and declaring the doom of Clinton’s comeup the Democratic nomination, Rush Limbaugh back, even as polls indicated that the Reverend launched an effort to persuade Republicans to vote Wright’s antics had punched a huge hole in public for Hillary in the Democratic primaries...

...Not only did the candidate herself often appear at three or four daily retail-level events like the Greensburg rally, but Bill and Chelsea also joined the act, crisscrossing the state to give Democrats a chance for a 4 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R J u n e 2 0 0 8 R o B e R T s T a c Y M c c a I n face-to-face encounter with fame...

...Sen...

...By early May, Limbaugh was forced to remind his radio audience exactly what they were aiming to accomplish...

...T H e c a M P a I G n s P e c T a T o R Controlled Chaos A belated rally by Hillary defies conventional wisdom...

...The long Pennsylvania campaign—six uninterrupted weeks following the March 11 Mississippi primary—gave Hillary’s campaign a chance to maximize the political value of those memories...

...Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning,” Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote in the Politico on March 21...

...In April, Chelsea stopped traffic in Philadelphia when she went on a Friday-night tour of the city’s gay bars, where one lesbian posed for a photo with the former First Daughter and then cheerfully told a reporter, “I grabbed her ass...

...A ” r e v s o s i i h e t m t l u o w s t a r o m e D y n a m t a t l u f t ub o d s i H t’ illary’s beha h lf in Pennsylvan c ia, although d n i either of these . two are going to be electable by the t ha s t l u s d n e h s u a c e B s o ha ’ t ha d n g n i g nother celebrity was also working on R o ush , e a xpla t ined s . c “It is . to keep e e t xac e tly w re hat’s i go t ing, give him a standing ovation...

...By the time Pennsylvanians went to the polls on April 22, Obama had outspent Hillary nearly three-to-one in the state, and national press coverage of her campaign was relentlessly negative...

...That concern spilled over into Republican ranks, prompting fretful calls from Limbaugh’s listeners who worried that the “Operation Chaos” campaign might actually help Hillary win, rather than merely weakening the presumptive nominee, Obama...

...Most of those TV news crews were from Pittsburgh stations and the Clinton campaign was clearly eager to cultivate local media—a strategic calculation...

...At a press conference the next day in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, reporters hammered her with questions about how long she could keep campaigning...

...Disregarding the calculus of the Beltway pundits, Hillary has repeatedly vowed to take her campaign all the way to the Democratic convention in Denver...

...Or, perhaps, in Pennsylvania...

...Though exit Kentucky—gave Team Clinton new reasons to reiterpolls failed to detect how these Republicans voted, ate their “electability” arguments...

...Yet perception is reality in politics, and hypedup hope of a Clinton comeback reportedly generated $10 million in contributions to her campaign in the first 24 hours after her Pennsylvania victory...

...Anyone who believed differently, they said, was “living on another planet...

...More than 160,000 Meanwhile, the May primary schedule—including Pennsylvania Republi cans re-registered as Demo- such swing states as Indiana, West Virginia, and crats in time to vote in the primary...

...Jeremiah Wright, went on a media tour that stoked Democratic fears that the reverend’s race-based radicalism might poison Obama’s mainstream appeal...

...She may lose, but she won’t quit—and as long as she doesn’t quit, the chaos will continue...

...Clinton was huge here,” Tom Aikens of the Latrobe Bulletin said, as a crowd of more than 1,200 packed into the Greensburg gym to hear the former First Lady...

...Few of Team Clinton’s public campaign encounters were quite so intimate—it’s useless to speculate about what Bill may have been doing behind the scenes—but by the time Pennsylvanians went to the polls, tens of thousands of them had gotten the chance to meet a Clinton in the flesh...

...no one could discount what some observers dubbed Hillary’s momentum was blunted May 6, howthe “Limbaugh effect” in an election that Clinton won by a little more than 200,000 votes...

...This is the first campaign I’ve ever been this excited about,” said Louella Zeminski, a local Clinton supporter who volunteered to help at Hillary’s March 25 rally in Greensburg, a town of 16,000 people about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh...

...Her margin of victory in Pennsylvania was actually 9.3 percent, but because of the way the vote totals were rounded, the press reported Hillary with 55 percent and Obama with 45 percent—a “doubledigit” win that the media immediately hailed as a Clinton comeback...

...But to a typical Pennsylvania Democrat or small-town newspaper reporter, she’s a superstar, still surrounded by the aura of her eight White House years with Bill...

...by Robert stacy McCain By late march, all the smartest people in Washington agreed that the fight for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination was over...

...I’m staying in this race until there’s a nominee,” she promised, and added that she would “work as hard as I can to become that nominee...

...While commentators were counting delegates and penning her political obituary, Mrs...

...After all, no one had ever predicted that Hillary would lose Pennsylvania (in late 2007, polls showed her leading by as much as 33 points in the state) and her margin was padded by Limbaugh’s “Chaos” crossovers, who will reliably vote Republican in November...

...Zeminski’s sense of excitement was shared by the Democrats who began lining up hours before the event, forming a queue that eventually extended more than a hundred yards down the sidewalk outside the college gym where Hillary was due to appear that afternoon...

...To a jaded journalist from the New York Times or the Associated Press, Clinton is just another politician...

...Six TV satellite trucks were set up in the parking lot behind the gym, evidence that a visit by the former First Lady was still news, even if the news was gloomy for her presidential hopes...

...A parade of pundits—including Dick Morris, Jonathan Chait of the New Republic, and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek—weighed in with columns declaring an end to the contest...

...Team Clinton’s only means of countering this onslaught was to get “under the radar” by attracting attention from local journalists whose reporting might be more favorable, or at least more straightforward, than the cynical stuff cranked out by the Washington-based press corps...

...sade clearly had an effect...

...J u n e 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 4 9...

...If you’re a Democrat here, you’ve got long memories of Clinton...

...Robert stacy Mccain is co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party (Thomas Nelson...

...Dubbed perceptions of Obama as a candidate who could tran“Operation Chaos,” Limbaugh’s mischievous cru- scend race with his promises of Hope and Change...

...Barack Obama was bombarding the airwaves with ads, and Clinton’s cash-strapped campaign couldn’t compete...

...Meanwhile, the headline in the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat was, “Hillary Clinton brings campaign to Greensburg,” over a cheerful story describing how the candidate “tried to connect to small-town folks...

...When Hillary appeared in Greensburg, for instance, the national press had latched on to her most recent gaffe— claiming to have braved sniper fire during a 1996 visit to Bosnia—and that was the central focus of their stories...