IT WAS the evening of the Second Super Tuesday and an engaging political forum was taking place at The New York Times headquarters in Times Square, New York City.
Thirty minutes into the discussion, the moderator asked his audience for a show of hands so that he could gauge the number of Hillary and Obama supporters in their midst.
“You don’t have to respond if you don’t want to,” said moderator Richard L. Berke, NYT assistant managing editor.
Americans, however, have no qualms about show-and-tell. Here, perfect strangers often reveal their political stripes without prompting. There was no fear of repercussion, as one Malaysian put it.
So when Berke called out Hillary Clinton’s name, almost half of the estimated 300 attendees shot up their hands.
An almost equal number did so to indicate that they were backing Barack Obama.
One Hillary supporter was indignant that the NYT allowed its columnists such as Maureen Dowd to launch slander and diatribes against the New York senator using words such as bitch.
She cited a Dowd column last month in which she repeated a joke about Hillary: “Obama is just creaming Hillary. And Hillary says it’s not fair, because they’re being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there’s no White Bitch Month.”
Berke, who made clear that Dowd does not report to him, however, defended her. “Columnists can say pretty much what they want to say. It is their platform. Columnists are there to be provocative, to get you thinking although you may not agree with them.”
He added that Dowd was a Pulitzer Prize winner for distinguished commentary in 1999.
Just a small handful who came that night stated that they were for Republican John McCain. “What do you expect, this is a Times event,” one man chuckled.
The NYT, often seen as a “liberal” paper, angered McCain supporters two weeks ago when it published what appeared to be an unsubstantiated story about a romance between the Republican nominee and a lobbyist eight years ago.
Elisabeth Bumilier, who covers the McCain campaign, found that Republican candidates could be difficult to cover “especially if you are from The New York Times”.
McCain, however, was more open and accessible compared with even some Democrats.
“He seemed to genuinely like the press on most days,” she said.
Naturally, the talk on The Issues & The Elections: Where Do The Candidates Stand that evening focused more on the two Democratic presidential contenders as they locked horns in Texas and Ohio.
“This is such an important night in American politics. Now, you can go home after this talk and watch the results on TV. What a perfect evening,” Berke said.
“When we planned this event months earlier, we thought that the race would be so over by this time and that the focus would be on the general election,” he added.
But no amount of crystal ball gazing seemed enough to predict the outcome of the Democratic presidential race so far.
“Our political reporter is writing three stories now, running over three scenarios. One, if Obama won in Ohio and Texas, the other if Hillary took the two states, and lastly, what it would mean if she won just one,” Berke said.
(It was about 7pm then, and the results were not known yet. For the record, Hillary won in both Ohio and Texas.)
Meanwhile, an NYT/CBS News poll showed that 33% of Americans felt that the economy was the most important problem facing their country. Another 25% listed the Iraq war and terrorism.
“When it started out, Iraq was the most important topic. Now, it is more on the bread and butter issues,” said domestic correspondent senior writer Robin Toner.
Although Hillary and Obama have made known their intentions about Iraq, the journalists believed that their plans would be amended once he or she was elected.
“The big problem is, neither the Clinton nor Obama plan can be implemented without aggravating sectarian violence,” one military correspondent said. “The Iraq war is a very difficult problem to handle.”
As Bumilier put it: “Their plan would last for as long as the person walks through the Oval Office.”
Someone in the audience wondered why social concerns such as gun control and gay marriages had not emerged so far.
“It will all come up during the general election,” Toner said.
It has been a little over a year since Hillary and Obama announced their White House bid. They have crossed swords in 20 Democratic presidential debates.
But the outcome isn’t getting any clearer now that Hillary has captured Ohio and Texas. As Berke put it: Fasten your seat belts.
