Remember back a couple of months ago when we had dreams of the presidential primaries being settled on “Tsunami Tuesday?”Among the roughly two dozen states that voted back on Feb. 5 was Illinois, and those of us who backed Barack Obama had a delusion that he would learn on that date whether or not his campaign would succeed. He could very well have made a glorious victory speech right from downtown Chicago.
WELL, IT DIDN’T work out that way. When all is finally finished with Primary ’08, it will turn out that Illinois won’t even be the most significant of the Great Lakes states in determining whether Obama or opponent Hillary R. Clinton will get to take on Republican opponent John McCain come the Nov. 4 general election.
Michigan is preparing to have another election of some type to determine how to split up that states’ delegates, and Indiana may also have a more significant effect than Illinois when the Hoosier primary takes place May 6.
The political junkie in me is a bit jealous of Indiana these days.
In the past week, Obama and former President Bill Clinton made campaign-related appearances in the land east of State Line Road. Hillary herself made three Indiana appearances on Thursday, showing up to greet potential voters in Anderson, Terre Haute and Evansville.
PERHAPS IT IS Illinois’ own fault that the General Assembly voted to bump up our primary election from mid-March (normally, it would have been held this week) to early February, coinciding with the mass of other states that didn’t want to get lost in the shuffle.
But it seems like this week’s Indiana campaign activity amounts to more attention paid to Hoosiers (not the sap-filled film about small-town high school basketball) than the candidates paid to Illinois in the weeks leading up to the Illinois primary – which Obama won handily.
But that large-state victory was overshadowed with Hillary Clinton’s large-state victory of her home state that same day, and her large-state victory in California – despite the vocal support of California first lady Maria Shriver, who even appeared with her cousin, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, to tout Team Obama just days before that state’s primary.
Illinois, which has more delegates and electoral votes than any other state in the Great Lakes region, wound up becoming a Midwest afterthought.
VOTERS IN INDIANA, Michigan, Wisconsin and even Iowa have received more tender loving care from the Obama and Clinton campaigns than us Illinoisans.
Our state got so little attention that those of us who want a fix of the political campaigns may very well have to venture to Lake County, Ind., should either candidate actually bother to venture into the Calumet Region to campaign.
Thus far, neither campaign has scheduled anything resembling an appearance in the part of the Chicago area that spills over into Indiana, although the Munster, Ind.-based Times newspaper earlier this week quoted Clinton backer Evan Bayh (also a U.S. Senate colleague of both Obama and Clinton) as saying Hillary likely would make an appearance there some time during the month-and-a-half remaining before Election Day.
Yet the bulk of Indiana campaign activity is going to come outside of Lake County, Ind., for the mere fact that the county is too attached to the Chicago area.
WITH NEARLY 500,000 of Indiana’s 6 million people living in that one county, it is not typical of the state as a whole. Its proximity to Chicago translates into a larger ethnic and racial minority population (39.4 percent African-American or Hispanic) than the state as a whole (13.4 percent, with most of that being African-American).
So I’m sure elements of both campaigns are ceding the Chicago-area portion of Indiana to Obama, while hoping to succeed in the rest of Indiana. Clinton backers probably would write off the entire state, except for the fact that Indianapolis does not dominate Indian to the extent that Chicago dominates Illinois.
Marion County (which contains the Indiana capital city) has just over 800,000, unlike the six counties that make up the Chicago area and comprise about 65 percent of Illinois’ population.
So Indiana campaigning is likely to become a political brawl in the small cities (places like Terre Haute, whose most reknowned assets are being the home of the federal prison where the U.S. government actually executes people and the site of the Miss Indiana pageant) of Middle America.
ONCE WE GET away from the large cities of Urban America (Indiana at times feels like an entire state that’s trying to escape urban life), we get into territory where Clinton’s campaign may very well have more appeal among the type of Indianans who are willing to publicly identify themselves as Democrats.
They are a scarce breed, although some political observers are wondering if the general dissatisfaction with George W. Bush will result in even solid-red Indiana going a little bit blue.
Let’s not forget that Indiana as a whole is a solid Republican state – the one place in the Great Lakes Region that the GOP can count on to give it solid backing, unlike Illinois which is solid Democrat, and places like Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota that narrowly went Democrat in recent elections.
EVEN IN OHIO, the one other Great Lakes state that Republicans have won in recent presidential elections, the Republicans don’t have significant majorities of support. Ohio is a place where the electoral votes went for George Bush the younger over Al Gore and John Kerry only because the southern part of the state that leans Republican overcame the northern part that leans Democrat.
Just imagine if people of the Cleveland area had turned out a little more strongly for Democrats in the past two presidential – the whole concept of “President George W. Bush” would be nothing more than a fantasy that only exists in some “bizarro world” where everything is opposite reality.
Instead, Cincinnati (the land that still thinks Pete Rose is a hero) prevailed, and we got two terms of “Dubya.”
THE POINT IS that Indiana is going to be in the Republican column come November. In fact, isn’t one of the points Hillary makes against Barack’s primary victories thus far is that he’s only winning in states that Democrats have no chance of succeeding in come the general election?
That fact is going to discourage Hillary Clinton from investing too much time or money in Indiana, no matter how much she wants a majority of those 83 delegates to the Democratic National Convention who will not view it as an insult to be called a “Hoosier.”
In the big picture, fighting it out too much in Indiana won’t pay off, since the bulk of the state’s vote come the November general election is likely to go to McCain, regardless of which U.S. senator wins the Democratic party’s presidential primary.
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EDITOR’S NOTES: Indiana’s largest newspaper gives us some clue of what Hillary (http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080320/LOCAL19/80320023/0/LOCAL0402#gslPageReturn) had to say during her appearances in the Land of Hoosiers.
Indiana’s second-largest newspaper speculates on the chance either Clinton or Obama (http://www.nwi.com/articles/2008/03/19/news/top_news/doc44cff12956fc9b6386257410008331a7.txt) will come anywhere near the Chicago area during their campaigns in Indiana. And no, I don’t consider Team Obama’s Gary, Ind., “open house” on Saturday to be all that significant.
Some speculation about the likely Indiana activity of the two Democratic presidential campaigns, (http://www.howeypolitics.com/2008/03/06/obama-clinton-headed-to-indiana/) coming from an observer who understands the mindset of Hoosier politicos much better than I do.
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