The campaign for the Democratic nomination went from political race to melodrama this past week. On the heels of stunning defeats in both North Carolina and Indiana -- and make no mistake, a two-point win in Indiana was a defeat for Clinton -- Clinton should finally have seen the writing on the wall and folded up her tent. This race is over and truly, it has been for some time. She can't win the nomination. Period.
What she can do is destroy the Democratic Party, at least in terms of its chances for taking the White House this year and of having a candidate who will help the party with down-contest victories as well (e.g. governors, members of Congress, state legislators, etc.). For a while, one could argue that an on-going debate between Obama and Clinton was a healthy exercise in American politics. While it might have been better for the eventual candidate to leave the other behind and focus on the already-chosen Republican nominee, there was an actual, living contest to pick that nominee. Now, I'd say that Clinton abrogated her duty in even that regard, running a pander-fest of false giveaways on both NAFTA and the ill-conceived "gas tax holiday" to buy votes. Still, politics in America rarely takes the high road. Hell, it generally goes out of its way not to do so. Even so, what Clinton is now doing is truly beyond the pale.
Those who know me know that I have little respect for Peggy Noonan. The Wall Street Journal columnist usually can't tell her a$$ from her elbows. That said, she's spot-on in a column out today.
The Democratic Party can't celebrate the triumph of Barack Obama because the Democratic Party is busy having a breakdown. You could call it a breakdown over the issues of race and gender, but its real source is simply Hillary Clinton. Whose entire campaign at this point is about exploiting race and gender.
Clinton has long played the gender card. However, I would argue that it has mostly been done defensively. She has used the fact that she is a woman as a shield emblazoned with the motto They attack because I am female. On the front of gender, I can say this. I have long looked forward to the day when a woman would be taken seriously for the office of the president of the United States. Having a woman in the Oval Office, all things being equal, could only be good for us as a nation. It would not fix all of our woes on the front of gender equality, but it would turn a decisive page in the battle. I thought that I'd be proud of such a candidacy. Instead, what I got was Hillary Clinton. That many women still see her as their champion even now baffles me. She has reduced being a woman from something about which to be proud, something equal to that of being a man, to being little more than another tool in a political bag of tricks.
Then, there is the subject of race. Clinton's actions on this front are much more reprehensible still. Her campaign surrogates went into overdrive Tuesday night, immediately attempting to shore up Clinton's media image by drawing firm -- and firmly divisive -- lines within the Democratic party. Noonan details an exchange, one that I actually saw take place, that aired on CNN.
Here's the first place an outsider could see the tensions that have taken hold: on CNN Tuesday night, in the famous Brazile-Begala smackdown. Paul Begala wore the smile of the 1990s, the one in which there is no connection between the shape of the mouth and what the mouth says. All is mask. Donna Brazile was having none of it.
Mr. Begala more or less accused the Obama people of not caring about white voters: "[If] there's a new Democratic Party that somehow doesn't need or want white working-class people and Latinos, well, count me out." And: "We cannot win with eggheads and African Americans." That, he said, was the old, losing, Dukakis coalition.
"Paul, baby," Ms. Brazile, who is undeclared, began her response, "we need to not divide and polarize the Democratic Party. . . . So stop the divisions. Stop trying to split us into these groups, Paul, because you and I know . . . how Democrats win, and to simply suggest that Hillary's coalition is better than Obama's, Obama's is better than Hillary's -- no. We have a big party, Paul." And: "Just don't divide me and tell me I cannot stand in Hillary's camp because I'm black, and I can't stand in Obama's camp because I'm female. Because I'm both. . . . Don't start with me, baby." Finally: "It's our party, Paul. Don't say my party. It's our party. Because it's time that we bring the party back together, Paul."
The candidate herself went even farther, however. In an interview with USA Today yesterday, again as noted here by Noonan but that has been repeated everywhere since it happened, she said the following.
In case you didn't get what was behind that exchange, [the previously noted quotation] Mrs. Clinton spent this week making it clear. In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
This is the race card, as starkly as it can be played. Again, Noonan:
White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? "Even Richard Nixon didn't say white," an Obama supporter said, "even with the Southern strategy."
If John McCain said, "I got the white vote, baby!" his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.
To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical "the black guy can't win but the white girl can" is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.
"She has unleashed the gates of hell," a longtime party leader told me. "She's saying, 'He's not one of us.'"
The late, great Will Rogers once said, "I don't belong to an organized political party; I'm a Democrat." How very right Mr. Rogers was. Were this happening in the Republican party, a party I so rightly detest, its real honest-to-God leaders would stop it post-haste. Instead, we have gutless wonders starting from Nancy Pelosi at the top all the way down to regular, non-elected superdelegates at the bottom. And make no mistake, it is probably only the superdelegates that can shut the Clintons up and save the party. And they need to work fast. While Omaba continues to pick up superdelegates here and there, enough this week that he's now surpassed what had heretofore been a Clinton lead from the start, it isn't the all-in avalanche that is needed. Noonan rightly indicates that the superdelegates, like the Democratic party leaders themselves, are sheep.
You know them. They're the ones hiding under the rock, behind the boulder, and at the bar.
They are terrified, most of them. They want the problem to go away. They want it handled, but they don't want to do it. They don't want to tell Hillary to stop, because they would likely pay a price for it, and not just with her.
They are afraid of looking as if they're jumping on a train that's speeding down the tracks and is about to roll over the damsel in distress.
Which is how Hillary -- and her supporters -- will paint it. Even though she's no damsel, and she causes distress.
Some insight from a superdelegate I spoke to Thursday:
It's not math anymore, it's psychodrama. If she can't have it, no one can have it. If she has to tear the party apart, she will.
There will be consequences for what has already come. Yes, Clinton could wake up on June 4th and come to her senses, shutting down this freak show and muzzling her foaming-at-the-mouth husband. Have we seen anything that would indicate that it will be so? And even if she does, have we seen anything from the Clintons to indicate that they would bow out gracefully and throw their full support to Obama as faithful members of the party, something that will be sorely needed to heal the divisions that she herself has created? I think not and the problem may be that it is because the Clintons don't view the Democratic party as belonging to Democrats, as belonging to America, but as belonging to themselves. They believe that they embody it as not even the Kennedys once did. As the Clintons go, so goes the party, nay the world. This is a recipe for disaster at a time when not only the party, but the nation can ill afford it. It is Sherman's march to the sea. It is scorched earth... not only for the soil of the party, but for that of the United States as well.
9 May 2008
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