E-mail a friendDave Davies
airdate April 21, 2008
For the past twenty years, Dave Davies has reported on government and politics in Philadelphia. He's currently senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, as well as a stand-in host for the public radio show, Fresh Air, and WHYY's Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane. Davies previously worked as KYW News Radio's city hall bureau chief and as city hall correspondent for WHYYFM. He's also a founding editor of the weekly newspaper, Community Focus. A Texas native, Davies graduated from the University of Texas.
Dave Davies
Tavis: Dave Davies is a veteran political reporter and senior writer for the "Philadelphia Daily News" who's been covering politics for over 20 years now. He joins us tonight from the City of Brotherly Love and sisterly affection. Dave Davies, nice to have you on.
Dave Davies: Good to be with you, Tavis.
Tavis: Not much brotherly love or sisterly affection of late in Philadelphia or anywhere in Pennsylvania where Obama and Clinton are concerned. How do you read this thing on the eve of tomorrow?
Davies: Well, you're right. These two candidates are wailing away at each other now. For five and a half weeks their advertising was positive and their tone was civil in their public comments, but Hillary started tip-toeing into the attack stuff about 12 days ago and Obama responded, and now they're just swinging at each other with two-by-fours.
It's a tight race, as you indicated in your billboard. The polls show Hillary leading between three and seven points, and it'll kind of depend on who gets out their base.
Tavis: What's your sense, though, of who's doing what to get their base out?
Davies: Well, Obama, as you know, is an inspirational guy and he has inspired thousands of volunteers, and they'll be out there on the streets in African American communities in Philadelphia and especially in the suburbs, where he has really concentrated hard.
Hillary also has a lot of friends and supporters in Pennsylvania, including the governor and the mayor of Philadelphia. They're all going to have massive field efforts out there.
One of the interesting questions will be whether young voters show up, Tavis. There was a massive increase in Democratic registration for this primary. This is one of those primaries where you have to be a registered Democrat to vote, not one of those were Independents and Republicans can decide on election day to just weigh in.
So there was a huge increase in Democratic registration, especially among young voters, and they're not really captured very well by the public opinion polls, since they use cell phones and they're not listed. And if they turn up in big numbers that could be good for Obama and give him the surge he needs.
Tavis: That's been a big "if" all through this campaign, Dave, and with all due respect to young people, who we love and represent 100 percent of our future, so we can't cast aspersion on them, why should that question be taken any more seriously in Pennsylvania than anywhere else? They haven't turned this race anywhere else, quite frankly. As yet.
Davies: Yeah, you just - no, that's right, you just can't tell. I guess the hope would be that the early effort to get people registered in Pennsylvania, where, as I said, you actually had to make the effort before March 24th to register as a Democrat, might give them just a little bit more of a sense of investment and turn them out. But again, nobody's going to know until the polls open tomorrow.
Tavis: Yeah. Let me go back to the point you raised earlier that you and everybody else has been talking about of late, and that is this negativity - the mud-slinging, whatever you want to call it. It ain't been cute between Obama and Hillary, by any other definition. This $64,000 question as to who is hurt and who is helped, if at all, by the back-and-forth negativity, there's some who argue, of course, that Hillary Clinton has put herself in a precarious situation by going negative.
And then there are others who are just as disappointed that the guy who talked about hope has now succumbed to being just another garden variety politician. How do you read this?
Davies: That's exactly the question, and it's interesting. For five and a half weeks they didn't go negative precisely because there are risks. You don't want voters to see you as part of the same old mud-slinging pol, and I think the reason Hillary Clinton finally went negative was that it was clear she was losing ground in this primary, that Obama was eating away at her lead, and so her advisers decided they'd go ahead.
And then Obama decided he had to respond. It's interesting, when we think back to elections like in 2004 when John Kerry was swiftboated by those folks who challenged his war record, one of the big criticisms was that he didn't respond quickly and forcefully.
So I think Obama's caught in this sort of a trap. He represents this notion of transcending partisanship and a different kind of politics. On the other hand, he can't be a wimp and he has to show that he will stand up and fight for himself. How it all plays out, I don't know, but I do think a lot of people believe that Hillary already had some high negatives, was already seen as somebody who would do what it took to win, whereas Obama, they weren't quite sure how that would play. But it's clear that once challenged, he has weighed in.
Tavis: The media, as you well know, has gotten more things wrong in this election than any election certainly in my lifetime. They've just been wrong about everything. That said, tell me the things tonight as we have this conversation that you think are certainties.
I think, for example, it's pretty much a certainty that Obama wins Philadelphia. Let's start with that and tell me if there's anything else tonight that you, as a reporter, are relatively certain of tonight.
Davies: Well, I think you can be pretty sure that Hillary Clinton is going to win a lot of the counties in the more rural and small-town areas of the state, and on the bigger question, it seems to me that this is not likely to change the basic dynamics of the race, unless Obama were to pull off an upset here.
One of the things that's interesting is that the Hillary Clinton campaign is heavily projecting the idea that Obama has staked everything on winning. He has out-spent her three to one, he has gone negative and undermined his own clean-Gene image in an effort to try and end this campaign now by defeating her in Pennsylvania, and that if he fails, having out-spent her three to one, that will raise terrible questions about whether he can ever win a tough swing state like Pennsylvania, even with that heavy spending.
And so I think they're going to argue that any win by Hillary is of momentous importance. My sense is that she's likely to get some kind of a win here and the certainty is that that will not change the dynamics of the race. Obama will still have a very strong argument that he will end up with the most popular votes and the most delegates. She will continue to make the case that she has a better chance of carrying key swing states against John McCain.
Tavis: Dave Davies, I think I've lost my satellite feed; that is to say, I don't have a picture anymore but I think I still have the audio line. You still with me?
Davies: I can hear you, Tavis.
Tavis: Wonderful. So let me finish up the next two minutes right quick. I want to ask whether or not you think the superdelegates are going to buy the argument that Mrs. Clinton is going to make when she comes out of Pennsylvania, so let's assume that she wins tomorrow.
She's going to make the case that you already articulated earlier, that Obama can't win in swing states, he can't win in big states, and he can't win in November against John McCain unless you can prove that you can do that. Will superdelegates, you think, buy that argument?
Davies: Well, with the caveat that anything we say is likely to be wrong, I'm going to guess that most of them won't, for two reasons. One is that what happens in a Democratic primary isn't predictive of what happens in a general election, and particularly a place like Pennsylvania, where only registered Democrats can vote.
And the fact that Obama failed to win among Democrats in those states doesn't mean that with his crossover appeal to Independents and some Republicans he might not do just as well in the general election. So I think that's really a different argument.
The second big problem, of course, which has been widely discussed, is that for superdelegates to make the decision that Obama is not likely to win those swing states and therefore should not be the nominee would require them to, in effect, overrule the verdict of the popular vote and the pledge delegates in all of these primaries, and frankly the fact that it's the first African American to get that far I think would just make it very, very hard for most of them to do.
Tavis: But after tomorrow there are still nine states to go. What's your sense of how this thing ultimately is going to play out?
Davies: Sounds like - I think they're just going to beat each other up for (unintelligible) state and we're going to see more of this, and then by the end I think what the party elders hope is that the superdelegates will then show their cards, so at least we know where they stand.
There are still a good number of them that are out there, a handful in Pennsylvania here, and I think folks hope that they will then make their decision so this doesn't go to the convention.
Tavis: There are some, very quickly, Dave, who argue that Obama and Clinton having to go at it in this way makes both of them a better candidate, a tougher candidate for the fall - that's one read, and that's a charitable read, I think. The flip side, the other read is that it portends for a very nasty, very ugly, very divisive, maybe even racist campaign, the most in all of those categories we've ever seen in a race for the White House. Which argument you like best?
Davies: Both are true. I think there's no doubt that they're giving McCain ammunition and they're also steeling themselves. My own sense is that a general election campaign has its own dynamics and people pretty much forget what happens in the primary. So I think it's going to be McCain versus one of these two.
Tavis: Any predictions about tomorrow, right quick?
Davies: My guess is Hillary wins it by a little bit, and then we're just kind of right where we were after we spent $11 million and yelled at each other for seven weeks.
Tavis: (Laughs) Well, one thing we know for sure, that this is going to be - already is the most expensive primary ever in history for presidential races, and I suspect that between now and November even more money's going to be spent, no doubt. This will be the most expensive race for the White House ever.
Dave Davies, thanks for covering the story and glad to have you on the program.
Davies: Glad to be with you, Tavis.
Tavis: Thank you very much.
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