With a consensus seeming to crop up within the Beltway that the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination will come down to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, it's very well worth noting that there is still a rather wide opening for another strong candidate to emerge -- one who might even have a better chance of securing the nomination than the two perceived frontrunners. Atrios touched on this yesterday.
I think the primary thing that an Obama run does is kill what was the long held conventional wisdom that the race would be between Hillary and someone who manages to emerge as the Not Hillary. Obama could've been the Not Hillary if he'd gone that path, but his knee-jerk tendency to triangulate has made that unlikely. So, right now we're looking at Hillary, Obama, and NotHillaryOrObama, who will probably be Edwards.And all this could change in a month.
Gauging by the similarity in general political ideology and voting pattern between Senators Clinton and Obama, it appears to me that Atrios is entirely correct in his reading of the race. Both Senators fall clearly on the liberal side of the political spectrum (if such a thing exists), yet neither is particularly far to the left within the Democratic Party. Both find themselves in the middle third of the Democratic caucus in the senate, with Clinton coming in as 21st most liberal of 44 Democrats and Obama coming in as 16th most liberal, according to National Journal's 2005 vote rankings.
As a result of these apparent similarities in voting pattern and rhetoric, it's quite possible that Clinton and Obama will be fighting over the same piece of turf over the next year, leaving open the potential for a candidate to build a coalition within the party from the left to the center rather than from the center to the left. Like Atrios, I see John Edwards as being the frontrunner for this position, though he is not a prohibitive one. Should Al Gore decide to or be cajoled to run, he would likely be able to fulfill this role, though if he doesn't others, including Bill Richardson, Wes Clark or even someone else (though probably not Mike Gravel), could play the part. But the key is finding the one consensus candidate to fulfill this role.
In some ways, this situation mirrors 1976, when two relatively ideologically similar candidates -- Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana and Rep. Mo Udall of Arizona -- and a few others (Idaho Sen. Frank Church and former Oklahoma Sen. Fred Harris included) vied for the left of the party, while former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, who was not as traditionally liberal as those mentioned above and who basically ran as a moderate, was able to win caucuses and primaries across the country by securing plurality support. In Iowa Caucuses that year, for instance, Bayh, Harris, Udall and Sargent Shriver combined to receive more than 32 percent support -- about five points more than Carter. In the New Hampshire primary that year, the four candidates received a combined 56.9 percent of the vote -- more than double Carter's 28.4 percent plurality.
So just as Jimmy Carter was able to build a coalition out of the voters not as clearly targeted by the leading liberal candidates, so too might a solidly progressive candidate be able to do the same with the voters being overlooked by Sens. Clinton and Obama. To be clear, there are noticeable dissimiliarities between this cycle and the one 32 years ago, most notably that the nomination process is significantly more nationalized than it once was and, more to the point, that Clinton and Obama seem to have more support today than Udall, Bayh, et. al. did going into 1976. That said, if Clinton and Obama continue along the same path, courting a generally similar batch of likely caucus goers and primary voters, another Democrat might well sneak in and capture the party nomination. After all, John Edwards does continue to maintain rather strong support from Iowans.
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