Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 11, 1992 TAG: 9203110268
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But the balloting continued to record a strong protest vote that could mean trouble for Bush in the fall. And hints of more damaging revelations about Clinton's personal life left commentators cautious about discounting former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas's chances of catching him.
"Super Tuesday nailed the election for Bush," said Atlanta pollster Claibourne Darden, president of Darden Research. "Super Tuesday may not have finished the election for the Democrats."
Primary balloting in eight states, including six in or near the South, gave Bush victories in the 60 percent to mid-70 percent range.
But the continuing ability of conservative ex-columnist Pat Buchanan to rally a sizeable protest vote against a sitting president raised warning signals, even to Republican analysts.
"Week after week, state after state after state, these are people that he cannot count on being there come the fall," said Douglas Bailey, a Republican and co-publisher of the Washington-based newsletter "American Political Network." "He will lose this election, in my opinion, if he does not spell out a vision of the future."
In contrast, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, once considered a possible embarrassment to Bush and the Republican Party, made only a minuscule showing.
On the Democratic side, Clinton assembled a traditional Democratic coalition of moderate whites, blacks, and labor to carry the Southern and border states - including vote-rich Florida and Texas - by impressive margins.
Similar coalitions used to be the basis of Democratic presidential victories, but in recent decades moderate and conservative whites have voted in droves for Republicans.
Tsongas won primaries only in his home state and neighboring Rhode Island. Former California Gov. Jerry Brown, who has roused some anti-establishment fervor in the West, scored no victories, but was battling Clinton for second place in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
In Florida, which was viewed as the most critical test of Tsongas' strength in Clinton's home region, the governor had a surprisingly strong double-digit margin of victory. Clinton's political organization overwhelmed Tsongas, who had spent little time in the state before last week.
"Clinton had the organization and Tsongas did not and it paid off in major ways," said Bailey, the Washington publisher.
There also was voting Tuesday in three states that elect convention delegates through caucuses of political activists, rather than primaries. Clinton won the Missouri caucuses, Tsongas prevailed in Delaware and no results were available from Hawaii.
Clinton's victories propel him into next Tuesday's Illinois and Michigan primaries with crucial momentum, and set the stage for him to lock up the nomination with wins there, several analysts said.
"The party leadership in Michigan and Illinois is now beginning to gravitate toward him," said Ronald Walters, a political scientist at Howard University and former adviser to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "He's putting together a coalition in the Democratic Party missing since the peanut farmer from Georgia."
"If Clinton wins both Illinois and Michigan, it's probably all over," added Brad Coker, president of Mason-Dixon Opinion Research, a polling firm based in Maryland.
But Coker and others noted that the test for Clinton is less his ability to win primaries than his ability to keep new revelations from rupturing his campaign. Earlier in the winter, he was plagued by allegations of marital infidelity and draft dodging, charges from which he seems to have at least temporarily recovered.
"The only person who can stop Bill Clinton now is Bill Clinton, and that's a possibility," said Robert Holsworth, a political scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University. "The dilemma for the Clinton campaign is that it always seems to be one `shoe-dropping' away from ending."
"Some other shoe could drop and it will probably be a high heel," said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist.
Massachusetts native Tsongas may have more natural appeal in Midwestern and Northern states than he did in the South, Sabato noted.
Because six of Tuesday's primary states - Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Texas, Florida and Oklahoma - are in Clinton's home region, his victories are still seen by some as regional. If Tsongas wins either Michigan or Illinois, the Democrats are probably in for a prolonged, state-by-state fight, the commentators said.
Should that occur, then "they'll slug it out in New York [April 7] and Pennsylvania [April 28] and California [June 2]," said Coker.
Clinton's victory means that Super Tuesday - viewed by some of its originators as a way to produce a more moderate Democratic nominee - has come closer in 1992 than in 1988 to working as intended. That year, Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore, a moderate, did well during the regional balloting. But the Southern votes also propelled the Rev. Jesse Jackson into contention, a result that alienated some Southern white conservatives.
"Super Tuesday has produced on paper the kind of candidate who would give George Bush the strongest opponent in a general election," said Merle Black, an Emory University professor who is co-author of "The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected."
"But we're not running a paper candidate," he said, adding that the regional primary could backfire once again if Clinton proves later to be fatally flawed.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB