Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the final debate before Tuesday’s critical primaries with two imperative goals: Challenge Senator Barack Obama’s qualifications to lead the country and raise doubts about his ability to defeat a Republican opponent as experienced as Senator John McCain.
For most of 90 minutes, Mrs. Clinton grabbed at every opportunity to accomplish those goals. She questioned Mr. Obama’s foreign policy credentials. She attacked campaign mailings he had sent out about her as “misleading.” She criticized him as failing to reject explicitly the endorsement of his candidacy by Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader.
Yet by the end of the night, there was little evidence that Mrs. Clinton had produced the kind of ground-moving moment she needed that might shift the course of a campaign that polls suggest has been moving inexorably in Mr. Obama’s direction for weeks.
Instead, in contrast to other debates — where she mixed a warm smile with a sharp attack — she was stern and tense through most of the evening, speaking in an almost fatigued monotone as she recounted her criticisms of Mr. Obama, some of them new but many of them familiar. She often sat staring unsmiling at Mr. Obama and at Tim Russert of NBC News, who, yet again, presented himself as a tougher challenge to Mrs. Clinton’s credentials than Mr. Obama himself.
Her most memorable moment — the one that seemed destined to be replayed in the days ahead — was not, say, a sharp rejoinder to Mr. Obama that might undermine his credentials and tilt undecided voters toward her. Rather, it was when she invoked a “Saturday Night Live” skit from last Saturday that showed television journalists fawning over Mr. Obama, another example of her campaign’s increasing frustration over what it considers unbalanced coverage of the Democratic race.
Complicated for Clinton
From the start, Mrs. Clinton’s task going into this debate, broadcast on MSNBC, was far more complicated than the one confronting Mr. Obama. National polls as well as surveys in Ohio and Texas suggest that her position is eroding; even former President Bill Clinton said the other day that he could not see Mrs. Clinton staying in the race if she lost one of those two states. For days, she had zigged and zagged between attacking Mr. Obama and celebrating the promise of his candidacy. With a week left, the debate provided what might have been her final opportunity to find an effective line of attack against Mr. Obama.
By contrast, Mr. Obama’s only task was making certain that the campaign did not stray from the road it was on. If he too was low-key and often unsmiling, he sat calm and unruffled, hands crossed, as Mr. Russert pressed her again and again. At a point when Mrs. Clinton apparently saw an opportunity — when she said it was not enough for Mr. Obama to simply denounce Mr. Farrakhan; he needed to reject his support — Mr. Obama did not take the bait.
'Reject and denounce'
“I would reject and denounce,” he said.
Mr. Obama had the advantage of being the candidate with relatively little to prove. The past few weeks have offered increasing evidence that Democratic voters have considered the arguments Mrs. Clinton and others have made against Mr. Obama’s candidacy — not ready to lead the country in a time of war; unexamined and subject to an array of attacks by Republicans in the fall; not substantive enough on the issues — and have, for the most part, rejected them.
He was helped by the aggressive questioning of Mr. Russert, who made a better case about Mrs. Clinton’s shifting views on trade policy than Mr. Obama did. But he also has gotten more self-assured with each debate. And while he did not sit by and take Mrs. Clinton’s attacks — rejecting her assertion that his mailing about her trade and heath care views was dishonest, or that his health care plan would be less effective than hers — he barely bothered to stake out any lines of attack on Mrs. Clinton, as much a comment on her political strength as anything else he did.
In many ways, he was the foil to her tight and grim demeanor.
Since the debate last week in Texas, and with national polls suggesting that the Democratic party may be rallying around Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton had seemed befuddled about what, if anything, she could do to knock Mr. Obama off his pedestal. It has been a continued source of frustration for her and her campaign
That did not change Tuesday night in Ohio. Mr. Obama, if anything, seemed an even more elusive target. Whether Mrs. Clinton can unravel this mystery over the next seven days may well determine whether her candidacy will continue beyond the voting in Ohio and Texas.
