The race for California

Feb. 5, 2008 | If Hillary Clinton pulls off a win in California Tuesday, you'll be able to look back and see a large share of the reason onstage with her at the Orpheum Theater Friday night in San Francisco. Clinton came out to a packed fundraiser flanked by a rainbow of state leaders -- Controller John Chiang (California's highest-ranking Asian elected official), state Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, along with a token white leader, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Earlier that day Barack Obama had been represented in Oakland by locally beloved Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy and the city's popular, famously antiwar Rep. Barbara Lee. It was a happy, high-energy event. But oddly, in an election Obama has framed as being about the future, Kennedy and Lee evoked California's race-relations past in ebony and ivory. While Kennedy is said to help Obama with Latino voters, who are overwhelmingly for Clinton, one might wonder why the campaign used a white stand-in rather than a real, live Latino leader. Indeed, he gave a shout out to César Chávez's nephew Federico, who supports Obama (his late uncle's union, the United Farm Workers, endorsed Clinton), but there were no Latinos or Asians onstage with him and Lee.

By Sunday the Obama camp had gotten better with its imagery, and added Los Angeles labor powerhouse Maria Elena Durazo to a starry women's outreach event at UCLA that had been billed as featuring Caroline Kennedy, Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Yet Durazo's late addition to the lineup was symbolic of the campaign's comparatively late understanding of the centrality of California's Latino vote to Tuesday's outcome.

California accounts for more than one-fifth of the delegates up for grabs nationwide in Tuesday's Democratic primaries and caucuses. A Democratic candidate who hopes to be successful in California has to acknowledge its modern demographic realities: Whites now account for less than half the state's population, and African-Americans are just 7 percent. Asians are now 12 percent of the population, while Latinos make up more than a third. On Tuesday, Latinos will constitute as much as a quarter of the Democratic electorate. In running well among whites and Asians, and in commanding a 2-to-1 majority of support from Latinos, who are now the state's second-biggest ethnic voting bloc, Clinton seems to have figured out California's electoral math.

But will the roster of multiracial elected officials Clinton has amassed behind her, symbolized on that stage Friday night, be enough? California was supposed to be Clinton's Super Tuesday firewall, but it's folly to talk about a firewall this far into a historic election in which Obama's strong appeal has taken her campaign, and much of the nation, by surprise. The last firewall Clinton supporters hyped was New Hampshire, where a 20-point lead turned into a double-digit deficit in a matter of weeks after Obama won Iowa on Jan. 3.

On the other hand, Clinton ultimately squeaked out a win in New Hampshire, after she was declared dead. Likewise, in California her once-devastating 30-point lead over Obama has evaporated into a dead heat, according to several recent polls, and Obama has clearly prevented Clinton from looting California's rich trove of delegates. She is still, however, expected to pull it out. And if she does, her not-so-secret weapons will be Latinos and women, as well as the early endorsements she banked back when she looked inevitable. If she loses here, it will be because even the rainbow coalition of leaders she assembled around her could not deliver the votes of their constituencies, once they got swept up in the wave of the cross-racial political participation inspired by Obama.

The handful of Clinton and Obama partisans I trust in California said the same thing: She'll probably win, but narrowly. Newsom, San Francisco's mayor, staked his confidence on Clinton's "phenomenal" campaign to sign up supporters to vote by mail, which rolled out just as she grabbed her surprise win in New Hampshire, giving the New York senator and her campaign workers an ornery back-from-the-dead momentum. Yet the latest Field Poll showed that Obama and Clinton are tied among voters who already cast their absentee ballots by mail; 17 percent of those voters, though, remain undecided (you can drop off your absentee ballot on Election Day), a figure that matches the rest of the state.

Clinton also banked an early lead with elected officials, many of whom went for her out of genuine love and loyalty, and some of whom may have jumped before they could see Obama had real traction. Either way, they've stood by her. Dellums, who has gotten flak for not backing the first serious black presidential candidate, praised her to the skies in San Francisco Friday night, telling the crowd that he got tears in his eyes reading Clinton's platform for urban America. Villaraigosa has likewise been stalwart, if not teary-eyed, even though he told me he's gotten a lot of grief from supporters and constituents angry he wasn't supporting the Obama "movement." I ran into him stumping for Clinton in Manchester, N.H., while we both waited to be on MSNBC, on Jan. 8. The New Hampshire primary started out as one of the darkest days for her campaign. Before Mayor Villaraigosa and I were on-air, Tim Russert and Mike Barnicle were talking about Clinton losing donors and perhaps even having to pull out before Feb. 5 to avoid a humiliating defeat in New York.

Villaraigosa dismissed such talk, correctly as it turned out, but admitted he saw the race tightening on the heels of Obama's impressive Iowa win, even in California. He then went from New Hampshire to Nevada to stump for Clinton, where she owed her caucus victory to winning the Latino vote 2-1. And in the past week Villaraigosa, Dellums and Newsom went stumping for Clinton all over California, kind of like in a buddy movie, "Los Tres Amigos on the Road," backing a candidate many of their progressive constituents disdain.

Next page: By process of elimination, I suggested the camera-shy Democrat had to be Obama, but Newsom refused to comment