Right now, I’m tired. And somewhat speechless. But I’m also, for the first time in perhaps my entire life, proud to be an American. We’ve so rarely done the right thing. I’m anxious to get my thoughts together and, hopefully, jot them down.
A recap of the primaries, courtesy of Keith Olbermann and Countdown.
What can I say? It’s a good day.
The Associated Press: Obama clinches Democratic nomination
WASHINGTON (AP) - Barack Obama effectively clinched the Democratic presidential nomination Tuesday, based on an Associated Press tally of convention delegates, becoming the first black candidate ever to lead his party into a fall campaign for the White House.
I wouldn’t hold my breath on a civil ending to this process, though.
Does anyone else feel like all the information we’ve gotten about and from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in these last few weeks — the Jeremiah Wright conversation, Hillary’s White House schedule, etc. — would have been a lot more helpful to all of us had we received it, I don’t know, sometime before the primaries began? Perhaps then we would have had a full slate of knowledge upon which to base our decisions. I’m not sure any of it would have done a thing to change my mind, but it would have been nice for the media to have reported on the candidates this thoroughly before we were forty-four contests deep.
Related: The Democrats’ anti-momentum, by Walter Shapiro (from Salon.com)
It has been said before, often by establishment demagogues and policy sycophants still informed by Cold War politics, that Barack Obama is too cerebral and academic to effectively relate to blue-collar Americans. Of course, this enrages me, not because it is untrue but because it is so depressingly accurate it makes me ashamed of my dimwitted countrymen. I think it is safe to suggest, though it sickens me to admit, that if anything keeps Obama out of the White House, it will most certainly be this perceived überintellectualism.
I got to thinking about this today after reading an article in The American Prospect — “The Obama Doctrine” by Spencer Ackerman — that outlined Obama’s foreign-policy mind-set by looking at his team of foreign-policy advisers, a diverse and impressive group that seems more likely to sip fine wines or full-bodied (possibly even foreign) lagers over nuanced discussions of race and class relations than to guzzle Bud Light and hot wings while watching NASCAR. And that type of highfalutin mumbo-jumbo just don’t jive with the American voter.
For example, take this line from the article: “This ability to see the world from different perspectives informs what the Obama team hopes will replace the Iraq War mind-set: something they call dignity promotion.” Dignity promotion is a pretty brilliant foreign-policy position. Instead of toppling governments and praying the wonders of democracy cure all ills, dignity promotion focuses on improving the welfare of people in developing nations, providing jobs and medicine to increase the quality of life so that people, in turn, are not tied by fear to the dictators who oppress them. Only then can democracy actually work.
By talking about a foreign policy rooted in human dignity, the Obama team seems to understand “… the simple insight that democracy does not fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of militiamen. Democracy, in other words, is valuable to people insofar as it allows them first to meet their basic needs. It is much harder to provide that sense of dignity than to hold an election in Baghdad or Gaza and declare oneself shocked when illiberal forces triumph.”
The common sense behind this approach, and the balls it takes to actually base one’s policy on it, is staggering, but I have little faith in the American people’s willingness to understand and accept it. It is much easier, as George W. Bush has proven, to frighten the American people and then simplify the argument and reduce the “enemy” to an oversimplified group like “Islamofascist” or “Muslim extremist.” Pay no mind to the struggle behind the anger, the root cause of a young girl’s willingness to walk into a market with explosives strapped to her waist, the ways the richest, most privileged nation in the world can bring more to the world that economic exploitation and warfare.
For some reason, though, this approach is seen as naive and weak. Hillary Clinton has been painting Obama with this brush, and John McCain, who is somehow an expert on foreign policy because (?) he spent six-plus years in the Hanoi Hilton and twenty-five in Congress, will most certainly do the same. Their claim is a simple one: Using your brain instead of your brawn makes you a pussy, and America, with all its cool gadgets of mass destruction, cannot afford to have a pussy in charge.
If the country buys into this irrationale yet again, it is once again degrading itself, admitting to the world that it has learned nothing in these last eight years, that its electorate is made up entirely of children who would rather elect the brainless jock as class president than the brainy intellectual who dared speak to them as though they were fully grown. Personally, I hated high school. I’d like to think we’re all about ready to graduate.
Please read: “The Obama Doctrine” by Spencer Ackerman
I’ve been making this argument for a month, but my audience is about a hundred per day. I think Stephen Colbert does a bit better. But I’m just guessing. Either way, the word is out.
** Update (Tuesday, March 11, 11:32 a.m. ET): This was pretty sweet, too. I have a thing for the 1972 presidential campaign. Sorry, but I’m a nerd. A huge, huge nerd.
I’ve spent the last few days trying to understand exactly where Hillary Clinton is going with her latest, most recent strategy. Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. She cannot win the nomination. Well, she can, but it would come at the cost of the general election. She would need to somehow weasel Florida and Michigan into the delegate fold, in which case she’d still trail Obama, though by a smaller margin, and then convince a healthy number of superdelegates to piss off the entire party and put her back on top.
There’s just no way to win it without bargaining for it, tearing the party in half, and more or less handing the presidency to John McCain. And as much as she’s been tickling the tender underbelly of that beast, I just cannot believe she wants a Republican in the Oval Office more than a member of her own party.
So why, then, has she spent the last two weeks ripping Obama down and, at the same time, building herself and McCain up? It makes sense to attack the front runner, so that part of her ploy isn’t that strange. If she wants to overtake Obama — even though the math makes it virtually impossible — she needs to position herself ahead of him where it matters. But how does the McCain rub and tug fit in? Why is she making arguments that seem to best support her potential opponent?
Well, I finally have the answer. Get ready for it, folks. The endgame here can be summed up with these four words: Vice President Hillary Clinton.
As I and everyone else with a calculator has stated, the chances of Clinton overtaking Obama’s pledged-delegate lead are slim, at best. The only real chance she has of securing the nomination rests in committing some form of political suicide, destroying her and her husband’s already diminishing legacy. And the Clintons are legacy whores. They love holding the keys to the Democratic party. They can’t just go away without a fight. But that’s precisely what the math dictates they must do.
The party has also moved away from the politics-of-old mentality that the Clintons represent. While not signaling an outright rejection of that paradigm — the uneducated and aging still LOVE Bill and Hill — Obama’s rise in the party, at least for this election cycle, has put the power of the party in the hands of a more intellectual, youthful faction of Democrats. That said, there is a lot less room for a Clinton on the general election ticket. So not only was Hillary facing an unlikely loss in the primary, she was faced with the realization that she wasn’t even needed on the ticket. Her message of experience is stale and boring. Obama shouldn’t need or want that from his veep. His pool of running mates needed to be someone who represented his mantras of hope and change. It simply could not be the person who spent the entire campaign telling people how stupid and naive they were for believing in all that mushy stuff.
On the other hand, it had become indisputable fact that should Clinton ever figure out a way to evade all rational thought and broker the nomination for herself, she would have to take Obama as her running mate. That is the only way to quiet the potential riot that would erupt in the streets of Denver, or at least a cyber-riot led by hundreds of angry nerds with blogs who have spent the better part of a year Baracking man-crushes on the Illinois Senator.
But then Hillary started scaring the shit out of everyone and saying things that basically amount to, If that Obama guy is in the White House, all of your children are going to die. Hell, even McCain can keep you safer than Obama. Of course, this is an absurd strategy. It makes no sense. As Keith Olbermann has said time and again, using the strengths of the nominee of the other party in order to defeat your opponent in a primary is not only ludicrous, it is without precedent in presidential politics. It’s also stupid. And Hillary Clinton is not stupid.
She is deftly using the seven weeks between now and the Pennsylvania primary to reemphasize the importance of experience in the minds of Democratic voters. She is moving to make herself a vice-presidential front runner after being relegated to a vice-presidential afterthought. She is saying to Obama, You can’t win in November without me. Take me with you. Take me with you.
And the tactic is going to work. By making McCain’s arguments for him, Clinton is implicitly saying that she is the only one who can thwart his attacks once he begins making them for himself. Furthermore, by saying that she has everything that McCain has (buzzwords: strength and experience), she is telling the Obama people that adding her to their ticket will make the Dems unbeatable in November. It’s the best of both worlds.
Of course, most people already knew this. That’s why there’s been talk of the possible Super Ticket. But, like I said, it made no sense previously for Obama to share his ride to Pennsylvania Avenue with someone like her. Now, thanks to some shifty maneuvers and a head-scratching strategy, though, it seems like Obama has no choice but to bring her along. And once the two of them did their thing and secured eight years in power, washing away all of the bad blood that has developed between the Clintons and the rest of the party this primary season, Hillary will be back as the inevitable presidential nominee in 2016. And that’s exactly where she wants to be.
The dynamic between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, to this point in their duel for the Democratic presidential nomination, has been interesting to say the least. Things have changed at a manic pace, volleying between amicable and contentious with each passing news cycle. The candidates have hugged. They’ve snubbed. They’ve shook hands. They’ve exchanged icy stares. It’s been great theater, if a little infuriating to anyone craving a more nuanced version of presidential politics. However, after the Clintons rode a tough-gal strategy to must-wins on Tuesday, it’s fair to assume that things may have shifted for the final time. So get ready, because this thing is settling into all-out attack mode, regardless of the tactic’s long-term effect on the party.
To this point, Clinton and her team of surrogates — most notably Bill, as red-faced as ever, wagging that finger as one borderline-racist and undeniably controversial comment after another passes from his seedy lips, and Mark Penn, a grotesque mess of unkempt hair and pedophiliac grime who looks as if he’ll spend a generous portion of his more than $10 million campaign haul on underage Thai whores the minute this race wraps up — have been most consistently on the attack. But, no doubt, that strategy has come at a price. The media has accused them of, among other underhanded schemes, injecting race into the contest, something that has cost Clinton almost all of her once formidable coalition of African-American voters. The Clintons have learned the hard way that playing hardball with a strong minority candidate is not always risk free. Any doubters need only look at South Carolina.
Meanwhile, the Obama campaign has only dabbled in the kitchen-sink strategies employed against them, and their hesitance to do so, which at times has seemed like an outright reluctance, seems to have cost them dearly in Ohio and Texas, where Obama came up shortest in voters’ minds on issues related to his perceived strength and readiness in the face of disaster. And, to the extent that they have challenged Senator Clinton at all, Obama himself has stayed out of the fray, allowing him to float above it all and maintain some semblance of intellectual, if not ethical, superiority
But now that he has been bullied to defeats in three out of four big states, with the prospect of the campaign going on for another three months at least, things are set to change, and the Obama team is about to find out that, just as it has been difficult for Clinton to play rough without raising racist flags, it can be awfully touchy coming at a female candidate as strongly as Obama needs to come at Clinton without facing, at one time or another, accusations of misogyny and whispers of glass ceilings and bitch-is-the-new-black solidarity.
It took Clinton a long time to figure out how to attack Obama without sounding like David Duke on a bender. When she did, though — the red-phone ad, the Canadian memo about NAFTA — it worked perfectly. Sure, there was the mystery leak of the picture of Obama playing dress-up in Kenya, but that got lost among all the right-wing bullshit about lapel pins and middle names. What hurt Obama most was the perception that he was a pussy, just an aloof sophisticate, a philosophical type, a naive rube long on rhetoric but short on piss and vinegar, which Clinton and future foe John McCain have plenty of.
Obama has already kicked up his game a bit. He’s starting to come at Clinton a bit stronger, rightly calling into question her foreign-policy credentials, which in actuality are about equal to his. By doing so, he is essentially calling bullshit on the idea that a first lady, at least when it comes to foreign policy, is anything more than a ceremonial place holder, that while Bill and others were in the trenches dealing with crises, she was taking tea and showing the good silver to the spouses of other world leaders.
The problem with this strategy, of course, is that it sounds sort of like gender bashing. It isn’t like race, where it gets brought up when it gets brought up. Mention Jesse Jackson or lynch parties, you’re talking about race. Marveling at the eloquence of a black man, you’re talking about race. These topics are pretty much separate from policy topics. Keeping them apart is pretty simple. The caveat here, however, is that the relevant prejudicial element of misogyny is the perception that men are stronger, and thus more capable to hold a position of power, than women.
In the 2000 New York Senate race, Rick Lazio pretty much sealed his fate as a political footnote when, in a debate with Clinton, he got in her face and waved a paper around, demanding again and again that she sign a pledge not to accept soft money. It made all watching really uncomfortable. As many people have noted, Lazio looked like an angry husband telling his wife what to do. Never mind that Lazio was making a solid point. It didn’t matter. It was classic PR politics. Any chance he had of wrestling female support from Clinton vanished that night in Buffalo.
So how, then, even eight years later, does Obama question Hillary’s experience and toughness without sounding like he’s putting down the little lady and saying the wives of a powerful men don’t do a whole hell of a lot? That is going to be the real challenge facing Obama in the coming months. He needs to figure out how to break down Clinton the politician, not Clinton the woman.
It’s not easy. It took the Clintons, their entire organization filled with seasoned political minds, the length of the campaign season so far to figure out what is in bounds and what is out, how to raise legitimate-sounding points without race bating. Obama’s learning curve is going to be a little bit shorter. To this point, though, he has shown a deft ability to adjust on the fly. If he wants to wrap the nomination up in convincing fashion, he’ll need to keep it up.
A great night for Hillary Clinton.
A delegate wash, at best, for Barack Obama.
A farewell to the sometimes-frightening, often-hilarious candidacy of Mike Huckabee.
Chris Matthews’ head did not implode or explode.
My August plane ticket to Denver, where I will cover the Democratic Convention in classic guerrilla-journalism style, with no press credential and no official assignment, might now be booked. Of course, I will need to finance this trip. Stay tuned for fund-raising details.