The Democratic Race
A topic provoking much discussion, particularly the dangers it holds for the party as it (eventually) gets around to trying to wrest the White House from the Republicans. Makes for some pretty good quotes.
The problem is not that Hillary Clinton is still in the race. She has every right to be. It is that she is running the kind of race that she is. Having failed to convince voters of the viability of her own candidacy, she is now committed to proving the unviability of his.
Hillary once said it takes a village to raise a child. Now she seems determined to destroy the village in order to save it.
or,
Now, Clinton and Obama will inflict themselves on the voters of Indiana and North Carolina and continue to make themselves less attractive to the general electorate. Obama's weakness among working-class whites - glaringly exposed in Pennsylvania - raise questions about his viability in Rust Belt swing states. Clinton's incessant attacks may have helped her win Ohio and Pennsylvania, but they have come at a price - driving up her negatives in the national polls, broadening the perception that she is untrustworthy, and generally damaging her standing with independents who like McCain already.
And the longer Obama and Clinton battle, the more invested in victory - and resistant to unity - their partisans will become. Right now, as many as 25 percent are vowing to support McCain or stay home in November if their candidate is denied the nomination. Some of that is probably just angry talk, the kind that is cheap in April. I suspect we'll know more in June. If the primary season concludes with a scintilla of clarity, perhaps the fence-sitting superdelegates will tilt decisively and end this thing.
But if there is no clarity in June, and if (for example) Clinton spends the summer grasping and clawing at a wounded Obama, like the Terminator after its skin had been stripped and its legs blown off . . . well, we know what could happen at convention time, and beyond.
Democrats are probably in no mood to take advice from a founding Republican, but Abe Lincoln's famous warning to the nation seems apt at the moment. He said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." And he would know. He was instrumental in consigning the fractious Whigs to the dustbin of history.
Or how about some wise words from Clinton supporter George McGovern:
"After I had the nomination won and everything except the crowning at the convention, the other candidates that I had defeated in the primaries and the caucuses ganged up on me and spent the next month just bad mouthing me around the country," he said. "And, of course the Nixon people used some of the quotes and threw them back at me in the general election."
It is in this regard -- not necessarily his general election defeat -- that McGovern worries history could end up repeating itself. Noting that Obama seems poised to be the eventually nominee, though believing Sen. Hillary Clinton should stay in the race, he called for a more civil discourse between the two candidates.
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This, however, is not the only similarity McGovern draws between his run for the White House and the current process. In '72, after he won the California primary and clinched the nomination, McGovern's Democratic opponents argued that the delegation should have been rewarded on a proportional basis, rather than winner-take-all. It was, McGovern says, a changing of the rules in mid-game that resulted both in the weakening of his campaign and his limping into the convention. Thirty-six years later, he sees parallels with the Clinton campaign's push to count the results of the non-DNC-sanctioned Florida and Michigan primaries.
"We can't overturn those rules now that the counting is over," he said. "I think Barack didn't even enter one contest [Michigan]. Those states knew what the rules were, all the candidates knew what the rules were, and to change it now I think is wrong."
And while Hillary and her supporters may not like to admit it, the data supports the argument that Obama is the more electable of the two Democrats.
It's electability, stupid.
That's what Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have been spinning to super-delegates and anyone else who will listen since she lost her grip on once-inevitable nomination.
There's just one problem – when it comes to independent voters, those crucial swing votes in swing states, Hillary doesn't hold the electability edge: Barack Obama does.
Independent voters favor Obama by a 2 to 1 margin over Hillary – 49% to 24% – according to a NBC/WSJ poll taken after the Jeremiah Wright scandal in late March. His approval rating among Republicans is almost twice Hillary's as well – 19% to 10%.
Crossover appeal is the key indicator of electability – especially for Democrats. Despite Democratic dominance of Congress during most of the 20th Century, no Democratic president managed to win more than 51% of the popular vote, with the exceptions of FDR and LBJ. What's the lesson? Democrats especially depend on Independent voters and even some centrist Republicans to win the White House.
That's true now more than ever: Independent voters are the fastest growing and largest segment of the American electorate, as detailed in former Clinton and Bloomberg pollster Doug Schoen's new book "Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System."
Obama's Independent edge has already had an impact in key 2008 swing states like Virginia, where independents made up 22% of the February 12th open primary. Obama won their support by a 2 to 1 margin, on his way to a 64-35 blowout victory.
And finally, a point I've raised before regarding whether or not Hillary really can withstand the Republican attack machine any better than Obama.
Going negative doesn't begin to describe what has happened. Hillary is going over the edge. Even worse are the flacks she sends before the cameras on her behalf, like that Kiki person, who smirks and shakes her head at the camera every time she fields a question. Or the real carnivores, like Howard Wolfson, Lanny Davis and James Carville, whose sneering smugness prevents countless women like my wife from considering Hillary at all.
To use the current terminology, Hillary people are bitter people, even more bitter than the white working-class voters Barack has talked about. Because they circle the wagons so tightly, they don't recognize how identical, self-reinforcing and out-of-touch they are.
To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, "Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?"
She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.
Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)
All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn't the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?
It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.
My only hope now is that Obama wins both North Carolina and Indiana, and that those victories have the effect of forcing Clinton out. Because if they don't, and if Clinton continues on like that fleshless Terminator all the way to the convention in August, there won't be enough time for the Democratic Party to heal the divisions that have been created in time to take on McCain.
