By plenty of metrics, Hillary Clinton won big on Super Tuesday — she won more states, more delegates, and more votes.
She showed that her support from minority voters was no fluke. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign got a good look at Clinton’s national organization that has learned from losing to President Barack Obama in 2008.
So it was a surprise to see the Javits Center half full on Wednesday night, with its cavernous hall partitioned by a giant American flag — one side crowded mostly with union members, gamely rallying to the cause, the other empty, but for supporters wandering to or from the bathroom.
Compared with a Sanders mega-rally, it was tame. Even compared with a Sanders event squeezed into a tiny space — it’s a common parlor trick on campaigns, creating the sensation of crowds, chaos and excitement, but not one that the Clinton campaign was able to pull off here in New York City, where the former secretary of state was the state’s senator for eight years and still keeps a home.
Pair it with the roster of speakers — the usual lineup of union and local elected officials, culminating with Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
The only uncontrolled moment came when a protester tried to interrupt Clinton, shouting “I’m a young black man,” and “I refuse to be brought to heel.” She raised her voice enough that the incident was hardly noted. The protester eventually left quietly, and Clinton went on with her speech.
Otherwise, it was a regular campaign rally. But it was more of the same from the establishment candidate. And as many Democrats begin to accept Clinton as the party’s standard-bearer, it’s worth wondering, should she get the nomination, whether business as usual will defeat the absolute chaos charging out of the Republican presidential primary.
It was fear of Donald Trump that had many of the Democratic faithful rallying around the Clinton camp this week.
“That guy’s crazy,” says Jay Floyd, 37, a carpenter, adding that Trump was “irrational,” and “bogus” and “talks more like a gangster.”
Maria Walker, 76, a retired teacher, says, “Mainly I’m here because I don’t like Trump.” Now that a Clinton-Trump face-off appears likely, “I’m more committed to work.”
Ronald Edwards, 47, says Republicans “scare me,” and are “a clown show,” convincing him to do “anything I could do,” from making calls to donating. His mother and brother, rarely politically active before, were now asking him how they could get involved.
Already looking past Sanders’ candidacy, Clinton and her surrogates painted a picture of overcoming barriers, not building walls, and tested her new line calling for love and kindness in this country — a clear contrast, of course, with the divisive businessman.
It’s worth pausing on de Blasio for a moment in all of this.
The guy who delayed endorsing Clinton just as his ideological twin gained in power will now be forced until the convention (which won’t be held in New York, by the way) to explain why the candidate who was later and lesser on many of his pet issues is now getting his support.
The mayor was greeted with scattered booing as he took the stage for a short speech, remarks which were overshadowed in amount of time and audience reaction by Cuomo’s oration. The governor channeled his inner Trump lyrically — and mockingly — talking about a wall, which was “like the China wall — but wider, but higher, but nicer… The wall is a beautiful wall.”
The audience ate it up. That’s what they wanted to hear, not proposals for paid sick leave and small improvements to Obamacare.
De Blasio tried a slam dunk Trump attack, for Trump’s KKK non-dismissal, but it didn’t have the same bite.
The mayor is not quite as adept at being the happy partisan warrior — his eventual rationale for supporting Clinton was not that she’d savage the dangerous Republicans, but that she’d be the progressive who could things done. She would harness the progressive beliefs that Sanders embodied and make them real.
Possibly. But before she does, she’ll have to harness the energy Sanders continues to stir up — and the rest of the natural Democratic base, too — to match the fervor on the other side.
This is amExpress, the conversation starter for New Yorkers.
