A funny thing happened on the way to Super Tuesday: New Haven and Connecticut took center stage.
One presidential candidate — albeit from 2004 — came to the Stevenson Road home of New Haven schools Superintendent Dr. Reggie Mayo just before the Super Bowl Sunday. John Kerry gave a brief, energetic pitch for Barack Obama to a gathering of some 60 political activists and Yale students busy this weekend lining up votes for the Illinois senator in Tuesday’s Democratic presidential primary.
Meanwhile, the two current Democrats candidates made plans for last-minute stops nearby. Hillary Clinton was planning a Monday morning appearance in New Haven at the Yale Child Study Center, her second Connecticut visit in eight days. And Obama plans to visit Hartford’s Civic Center Monday afternoon for a campaign rally.
And leading GOP presidential candidate John McCain came to Fairfield Sunday.
All this in a small state, just one of 22 states (plus American Samoa) voting in what is basically a national primary Tuesday, with delegate-heavy states like California and New York the big prizes. Until the past week no one expected Connecticut to play much of a role in the primary or to host visits from leading candidates. Now the race between Clinton and Obama has tightened, too close to call, Nutmeggers have registered to vote in record numbers, and the state suddenly matters. New Haven has come alive with hundreds of volunteers canvassing neighborhoods all over the city in the lead-up to the primary.
With another “Super” contest closer at hand — the Super Bowl — Obama organizers decided not to try to organize a mass rally for John Kerry’s stopover Sunday afternoon. Instead, they chose Dr. Mayo’s house near the Yale Golf Course and Hopkins school in Upper Westville as the gathering place for a quick pep rally. (Mayo is pictured in his driveway with Obama supporter Henry Fernandez.)
A sizable portion of the crowd consisted of Yale students who have knocked on 4,700 doors and contacted more than 1,300 voters in person the past few days, “71 percent of whom were for Obama,” according to organizer Rachel Plattus. Plattus, a Yale undergraduate, represents Ward 1 on the Board of Aldermen.
In his remarks, Kerry spoke of his days as a Yale undergraduate in the early ’60s, going south to fight for racial justice. This campaign is another one of those historical moments, he said. (Click on the play arrow to watch his remarks.)
By electing Obama, he said, “We can point to people that we are a country where we hold these truths to be self-evident — written incidentally by a 33-year-old. Where we actually can remind people that this is a country that makes real the dream of Martin Luther King when he was 34 years old, that in fact we judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”
He repeatedly referred to Obama’s “story.”
“This is that race, where we give life to the story of an individual who was raised by a single parent whose maternal grandparents gave him values, gave him purpose,” to go on to become the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama, Kerry noted, went on “not to Wall Street to make millions of dollars but to go back to Chicago to help make the lives of disenfranchised people better. Those are the values that you want in the White House.”
Kerry spoke also of the “excitement and focus” Obama’s candidacy generated in Indonesia and Botswana, where he recently traveled on Senate business. “I saw the way that his presidency would have the ability to reach out to less developed countries, to reach out across the divide.” Click on the play arrow to watch his remarks on that subject.
The CT Spin
So what explains all this political star power descending on Connecticut?
One Kerry staffer volunteering for Obama said that when she and colleagues asked where they should volunteer, the answers were Connecticut and an even smaller Super Tuesday state, Delaware. “This is where they said they needed the bodies.”
Why that is depends, of course, on which camp’s spin you consult.
State Rep. Jason Bartlett, co-chair of Clinton’s Connecticut steering committee, said his candidate is looking for a knock-out punch. Obama has no chance of winning other New England and mid-Atlantic states, Bartlett argued, which leaves Connecticut — currently too close to call — his only hope of a regional victory.
“He needs a state in the Northeast. That’s why it’s a battleground. Wednesday morning, he’s got to point to a win,” Bartlett argued. “We would like to deny him a win. Then he doesn’t have a win in the northeast.
“That’s the real reason Connecticut’s in play. To be brutally honest, the delegates are going to be fairly even.”
Connecticut’s 60 Democratic delegates are apportioned partly by results in each Congressional district, partly by overall statewide percentage of the vote.
Obama worker Marty Dunleavy (pictured), a New Havener and National Democratic Committeeman, argued that the closeness of the national race makes every delegate worth fighting over for each camp. That makes even small states more important, he said.
Dunleavy spun the race as Obama’s chance, not Clinton’s, to score a devastating symbolic knock-out. He noted that Clinton lives “just 12 miles” from the Fairfield County border.
“This is an opportunity for Hillary Clinton, with all her Wall Street and Fairfield County connections, to get a black eye,” Dunleavy said. He observed that until recently CLinton had been leading Connecticut by more than 20 points in some polls. “For her to all of a sudden have to spend time and resources here shows how soft her support really is.”