The message from Democrats in South Carolina, delivered with that soft southern twang, is this: assume victory here at your peril.
It's 19 months out from the 2016 presidential election and Hillary Clinton is the only Democrat to declare a candidacy so far. Some say the party's nomination is still to play for, even if the former secretary of state, senator and first lady seems unassailable in the polls.
"Polls mean absolutely nothing," Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe told reporters before addressing a Democratic Party convention in the early presidential nominating state of South Carolina on Saturday.
McAuliffe should know. He was chair of Clinton's 2008 campaign when she was well ahead of Barack Obama in early polls, only to be beaten by the Illinois senator with a 28-point margin in South Carolina, the first state in the South to pick candidates. Clinton's victory in 2008 was thought to be inevitable until it was not.
Jonathan Metcalf, Obama’s political director in South Carolina, notes the future president was struggling to bridge a 38-point deficit with Clinton when he began working on his campaign.
“You take nothing for granted in South Carolina,” he said.
One Democrat who has made enough noise to be heard above the media hubbub of Hillary's fledgling campaign is former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley.
“Stay tuned,” O’Malley’s told reporters in South Carolina on Saturday, when asked about his widely anticipated presidential run. His supporters expect an announcement from the Irish- American next month in Baltimore, the city he ran as mayor from 1999 to 2007.
Progressive record
O’Malley (52), who arrives in
Ireland
today for a two-day visit*, has taken a few sideswipes in Clinton’s direction. He has questioned her liberal credentials, challenging her new-found leftist streak and cautious, poll- tested positions on social issues, while playing up his progressive record as a two-term governor and “executive experience” of running a city and a state.
The telegenic politician shares many policies with liberal Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who has fired up the party's grassroots base that are so critical to winning the party nomination.
In a small field of possible Democratic candidates, O’Malley’s criticisms of Clinton are being noticed among the grassroots. He is polling at around 1 to 3 per cent, compared with Clinton at 60 to 69 per cent.
Fighting economic inequality, a touchstone populist issue, O’Malley is, like Obama, pushing for a stronger middle class through the “economics of inclusion” and greater upward mobility. He wants a national minimum wage, protections for trade unions, equal pay for women, affordable education and increases in social welfare benefits.
In a dig at dynastic Bush- Clinton presidential succession, he said last month that the presidency was “not some crown to be passed between two families.”
O’Malley, an opponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal that Obama wants to sign with 11 Asian countries, has needled Clinton on her pivoting position on free trade deals.
“Hard choice?” he told supporters in an email, riffing on the title of Clinton’s 2014 memoir. “Nope. To be opposing bad trade deals like TPP is just common sense.”
He wants to reinstate Glass-Steagall, the 1933 act that created a fire-break between traditional banks and riskier investment banking activities, which president Bill Clinton repealed in 1999, a move that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.
Same-sex marriage
Hillary Clinton’s position on same-sex marriage has evolved. She opposed it 2008, said it was “a matter left to the states” in 2014, and now supports it in this campaign. In contrast, O’Malley has held solid ground on the issue and led Maryland’s passage of a same-sex marriage law in 2012.
This month he said he was “glad secretary Clinton’s come around to the right positions on these issues” and criticised her for poll-testing policies rather than following principles.
“He is addressing a lot of progressive issues that people want to hear,” said Linda Dyer Hart from Tega Cay, South Carolina and a member of Irish American Democrats. “People don’t want to hear what polls are telling them they should be talking about. We get the sense from him that he is speaking from the heart.”
Asked by a local reporter on Saturday how his message is different from Clinton’s, O’Malley asked back: “Is she here?”
No was the response. Instead, Clinton sent McAuliffe and a video message, which at first wouldn’t play to the 1,000 attendees at the convention due to a technical glitch. “I guess it was different in every way then,” O’Malley said with a smile, revelling in her absence.
O'Malley was joined in Columbia by likely candidates such as independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee.
"My ears have begun to get a little tickled by Mr O'Malley's comments," said Kimberlyn Carter, a delegate at the convention from North Carolina. She likes his policies on debt-free college education and expanding early childhood education. She liked it last week when he called Republican claims that regulation leads to income inequality "bullshit."
“The critical demographic in this state is African-American women,” Carter said. “Us women of colour like that kind of straight-talking.”
O'Malley has been a frequent visitor to the early nominating states of Iowa and New Hampshire, pressing the flesh in diners, bars and other direct-to-voter meetings.
With a borrowed guitar in hand, O'Malley, who plays in an Irish rock band (O'Malley's March), sang This Land Is Your Land in a New Hampshire bar earlier this month. The political ballad was written by Woody Guthrie as a leftist response to God Bless America.
On Saturday, railing against economic inequality for lower-paid Americans, O'Malley quoted "the Poet Laureate of the American Dream, Bruce Springsteen" and his blue-collar lament The River.
"I tell people all the time: Martin O'Malley is a rock star," said Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina Democratic state representative. "He has energy, he is a great spirit . . . I do expect Hillary Clinton to win South Carolina, but it is not going to be easy."
Others aren’t so sure of her victory. Clinton has a universal name recognition and the profile that comes with spending three decades on the national stage. Conversely, that brings with it the tight security detail that surrounds a former first lady and secretary of state, which may give the guitar- strumming O’Malley an edge in informal settings.
Close contact
“The closest people are going to get to Hillary Clinton is her Secret Service detail and a rope line,” said Boyd Brown, another former Democratic member of the South Carolina House of Representatives.
“O’Malley is going to be in living rooms and at kitchen tables,” Brown said. “Retail politics is huge in all three early primary states, and that plays to his advantage.”
Some delegates said that O’Malley has nothing like Clinton’s profile in the state and that he will struggle to challenge her.
Obama joked at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday about how Clinton went unnoticed at a Chipotle fast-food outlet on her campaign road-trip to Iowa.
“Not to be outdone, Martin O’Malley kicked things off by going completely unrecognised at a Martin O’Malley campaign event,” cracked the president.
* Hours before his scheduled arrival in Dublin, Mr O’Malley cancelled his Irish trip to return to the US in response to the violence in Baltimore following the funeral of a black man, Freddie Gray, who died on April 19th after being injuried in police custody.
