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Thursday, February 14, 2008

Fiddle dee dee.

Posted by Jill | 6:12 AM

There's a line in the book Gone With the Wind that I'm not sure made it into the movie. It occurs after the war when the O'Hara's former overseer, Jonas Wilkerson returns to Tara with his flashily-clad wife, Emmie Slattery, to offer to buy the place. At the end of a heated diatribe, Scarlett O'Hara says "I’ll tear this house down, stone by stone, and burn it and sow every acre with salt before I see either of you put foot over this threshold."

The way things are going for Hillary Clinton right now, she clearly sees herself as Scarlett O'Hara, willing to destroy Democratic hopes for regaining the presidency, to keep Barack Obama's Jonas Wilkerson from obtaining this nomination:

Neither candidate is expected to win the 2,025 pledged delegates needed to claim the nomination by the time the voting ends in June. But Mr. Obama’s campaign began making a case in earnest on Wednesday that if he maintained his edge in delegates won in primaries and caucuses, he would have the strongest claim to the backing of the 796 elected Democrats and party leaders known as superdelegates who are free to vote as they choose and who now stand to determine the outcome.

Mrs. Clinton’s aides said she could still pull out a victory with victories in the biggest primaries still to come, including Ohio and Texas next month. But Mr. Obama’s clear lead in delegates allocated by the votes in nominating contests is one of a number of challenges facing her after a string of defeats in which Mr. Obama not only ran up big popular vote margins but also made inroads among the types of voters she had most been counting on, including women and lower-income people.

Should the cracks in her support among those groups show up in Ohio and Texas as well, it could undermine her hopes that those states will halt Mr. Obama’s momentum and allow her to claim dominance in many of the biggest primary battlegrounds.

With every delegate precious, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers also made it clear that they were prepared to take a number of potentially incendiary steps to build up Mrs. Clinton’s count. Top among these, her aides said, is pressing for Democrats to seat the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan, who held their primaries in January in defiance of Democratic Party rules.

[snip]

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers acknowledged that it would be difficult for her to catch up in the race for pledged delegates even if she succeeded in winning Ohio and Texas in three weeks and Pennsylvania in April. They said the Democratic Party’s rules, which award delegates relatively evenly among the candidates based on the proportion of the vote they receive, would require her to win by huge margins in those states to match Mr. Obama in delegates won through voting.

The delegate math set up a new front in the battle for the party’s presidential nomination, one based on competing views of how the party leaders and elected officials whose vote will determine the outcome should make their decisions.

Mrs. Clinton’s aides said the delegates should make their decision based on who they thought would be the stronger candidate and president. Mr. Obama argues that they should follow the will of the Democratic Party as expressed in the primary and caucuses — meaning the candidate with the most delegates from the voting.

First of all, the rules which are keeping the Florida and Michigan delegates from being seated were well-known to both candidates at the time of the primaries. So for Hillary to want to change the rules now because she is behind in the delegate count smacks of the sense of entitlement of someone else with whom we've become all too familiar:

Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.… It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that." So why could George get away with it? "He was just too easygoing and too pleasant."

Another fast friend, Roland Betts, acknowledges that it is the same in tennis. In November 1992, Bush and Betts were in Santa Fe to host a dinner party, but they had just enough time for one set of doubles. The former Yale classmates were on opposite sides of the net. "There was only one problem—my side won the first set," recalls Betts. "O.K., then we're going two out of three," Bush decreed. Bush's side takes the next set. But Betts's side is winning the third set when it starts to snow. Hard, fat flakes. The catering truck pulls up. But Bush won't let anybody quit. "He's pissed. George runs his mouth constantly," says Betts indulgently. "He's making fun of your last shot, mocking you, needling you, goading you—he never shuts up!" They continued to play tennis through a driving snowstorm.

It is something of an in-joke with Bush's friends and family. "In reality we all know who won, but George wants to go further to see what happens," says an old family friend, venture capitalist and former MGM chairman Louis "Bo" Polk Jr. "George would say, 'Play that one over,' or 'I wasn't quite ready.' The overtimes are what's fun, so you make your own. When you go that extra mile or that extra point … you go to a whole new level."

And we've seen where THAT kind of sense of entitlement gets us.

I don't even remember who, other than John Edwards, had been making noise about running for president before Hillary Clinton tossed her hat into the ring, but there's been an undercurrent of restoration to her entire campaign, not all that different from the undercurrent of restoration that accompanied George W. Bush's campaign in 2000. That the vote in 2000 was even close enough for the Bush family to steal that election is America's (and yes, Al Gore's) eternal shame. But for all that the Clinton years were accompanied by peace and prosperity, there's no guarantee that a Clinton restoration, coming as it would after the kind of botch job not even Poppy at his most feckless could have managed, would clean up this mess. And many of the young voters who are supporting Barack Obama only barely remember the prosperity of the 1990's; all they remember is the hot and cold running scandals.

It doesn't matter how many of the scandals should have been nonissues and were inflated by Republicans and a compliant media into a national crisis. What matters is that this is what people remember. And when Bill Clinton goes out on the campaign trail, he makes it very clear that while his wife may be the candidate, this is about a third term for HIM -- because for Bill Clinton, it's always about HIM, because his need for attention and adulation is insatiable.

But this game isn't over by any stretch of the imagination. It's entirely possible that voters in states like Texas and Ohio will respond to the new meme of Hillary Clinton as Struggling Underdog -- and take this race to the convention. And once at the convention, the Democratic hackocracy, armed with some fragile ammunition that Hillary Clinton is viable, can ignore that Barack Obama needs an entire sports arena for his primary victory rallies and can ignore that new Zogby poll showing that their preferred candidate not only would lose to John McCain, but would just barely squeak by Mike Huckabee in a general election race.

Hillary Clinton may be right that her experience in Washington and exposure to how the executive branch works makes her more prepared on day one. But if she can't get by two of the lamest Republicans ever to seek the office, and if the trend is that the more her race goes on, the less support she has, what difference does it make when one of those Lame Republicans is the one with his hand on the Bible on January 20?

But at least that Jonas Wilkerson, Barack Obama, won't be the one. She'll sow every acre with salt before that happens.

Fiddle dee dee. I'll think about that tomorrow.

Labels: Hillary Clinton

4 comments

4 Comments:

Wren said...

Fantastic post. Thank you for articulating my Democratic fears about Hillary (and Bill) Clinton so clearly.

2/14/08, 11:21 AM

Derek said...

Damn straight, Jill. I've been worrying about this ever since the word "superdelegates" first started popping up in late January.

Obama won all the caucuses, so the Clinton campaign is talking about how the caucuses are "inherently unfair." JUST like they would be if THEY had won the caucuses. Excuse me, I'm feeling kind of queasy...

What the fuck ever happened to getting elected by getting the most votes, for Christ's sake.

2/14/08, 2:24 PM

Unknown said...

So when it comes to Michigan and Florida the votes should not count because you can't change the rules midway. However, in the case of the Superdelegates..those rules need to be done away with, might I add..midway. Because the voters decide, right? Of course, unless you're a voter in Michigan and Florida? I hear all this talk, the voters want Obama, but when you count the votes its apparent, not ALL the voters want Obama. Not even close to all.

2/14/08, 2:58 PM

Greg said...

Oh, but don't you see, Jill? Hillary would clearly be better than Old Man McCain, so we just need to shut up about her and let the process take its course, lest the rabid Obamites and far-left malcontents do harm to her potential general election chances.

I'll shut up and get in line should she win the nom, but in the meantime I am not for one minute buying the Clinton "shut up and let me play hardball because I can" line. And yeah, I know, Obama's been winning on pretty words and a pretty face more than anything else, but his success has thus far been with voters, where it should be. Clinton would be nowhere without The Establishment looming in the shadows -- it really makes that 1984 Ad parody seem especially prescient.

2/14/08, 7:14 PM