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Clinton Obama Filter redux
Obama’s response the Hillary talking about the Kennedy assassination was that the remark was “unfortunate and has no place in this campaign”.
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Responding to a statement by calling it “unfortunate and has no place in this campaign” is the weakest, most boilerplate message that an opposing campaign can send while still making it unambiguously clear that they completely disagree with the statement itself (and want no part of the fallout). Obama’s camp did not make a sideshow to, as Hillary would say, “reject and denounce” her words, nor did they take the opportunity to grab a soapbox and elaborate on their answer (they had responded with a very terse statement). If you want to see “capitalizing on her gaffes”, look to Clinton losing no time in calling Obama’s “bitter” remarks as “elitist”, or Obama accusing McCain of having poor judgment and understanding of foreign policy after McCain’s gaffe in confusing Shia and Sunni. The statement from Obama’s camp in this case is simply political speak for “go hang yourselves with your own rope, we want no blood on our hands.” Far from “dipping into the fray” here — the Obama people aren’t touching this with a ten-foot pole, even though the media obliged them to release a response on the incident.
Making the mistake in appearing to sympathize with Clinton’s remarks would only leave an opening for Obama himself to get dragged down by this. It would be exactly the kind of political naivety that he is accused of, not to mention how patronizing such a gesture would appear to be. And why is it that people are always asking for Obama or Dean or some other figure to intervene on Clinton’s behalf (for example, asking Dean and other party elders to denounce sexist remarks from certain media commentators)? Did Obama ask Clinton or Dean to defend him from, say, false Muslim smears? Nevermind that having someone else fight her battles would only undermine her carefully-crafted image of toughness. If you want to see sexism in this campaign: why do people keep asking the other principle players to help Hillary? It’s demeaning to make the suggestion. She can defend her own words, just as everyone expected Obama to defend his own “bitter” remarks.
The main sin of Clinton’s remarks: it’s completely tone-deaf. In the context of Huckabee’s joke during a recent NRA speech about someone pointing a gun at Obama, Kennedy’s cancer diagnosis this past week, and the ongoing concern about the safety of black presidential candidates (concerns that, for instance, led Colin Powell’s wife to forbid him from ever making a presidential run and led the Secret Service to start protecting Obama far earlier than usual due to death threats), what Clinton said was astoundingly careless coming from a seasoned pol with an iron media discipline. And while Huckabee to his credit apologized to Obama fully and sincerely in subsequent interviews, Clinton’s non-apology looked like it was more aimed to placate the Kennedy clan rather than smooth things over with Obama himself. All this has probably cast some serious doubts among the big donor-types as to whether Clinton still has “it” to play the political game on a national level. That famed Clinton mojo is fading, fast.
What one should really be mad about is how incredibly weak on the facts Clinton was in citing evidence for her argument. Bill Clinton’s last nomination contest was on June 2, 1992 (not mid-June as Hillary stated), but the nomination was already decided in March when Paul Tsongas dropped out. As for RFK, it’s true that his last race in California during June was closely contested and pivotal, but there were only 13 primaries in 1968 and it was only 12 weeks from the first contest (New Hampshire on March 12th) to June 4th. So her bringing up RFK might’ve said something about how late on the calendar it’s getting, but nothing about how long the primary season has dragged on: it’s been almost twice as long since the first contest this year. If she were writing an essay and chose to use the 1968 and 1992 contests to support her thesis that “primary contests used to last a lot longer,” she’d receive a D+ for this effort.
If Clinton were really trying to be intellectually honest in discussing extended primary contests, she’d be citing 1972, 1980, and 1984 as examples instead. And the track record there is dismal for the Democratic party. Despite having clinched the 1972 nomination, McGovern faced having his two opponents staying in the contest all the way until the convention while trying to peel away his delegates; on the Colbert Report, McGovern recalls his nomination struggle where he and his team spent the weeks before the convention on the phone with his California delegation instead of vetting his VP candidate, leading to the Eagleton fiasco. Democrats were obliterated that year. 1980? Ted Kennedy lost in delegates but took the fight all the way to the convention, getting no closer but forced Carter to chase him down on the stage when it came time to lift their hands together in a sign of party unity, demonstrating the exact opposite. Another Democratic loss. And 1984? Hart fell behind frontrunner Mondale but kept fighting until the bitter end under the premise that “unpledged superdelegates that had previously claimed support for Mondale would shift to his side if he swept the Super Tuesday III primary.” (Sound familiar?) And yes, yet another Democratic loss in a landslide. With the protracted nomination record like this, you can see why the Democratic party is trying so hard to wrap the nomination up and move on to the convention. Had Hillary Clinton wanted to talk about extended nomination fights, she should have been discussing McGovern and Mondale, not RFK and Bill Clinton whose fights weren’t nearly as long nor contested by historical standards. So that’s not why she brought up Bill Clinton and RFK.
No, Hillary Clinton didn’t simply “referred to the fact that Bill Clinton and Bobby Kennedy and their opponents were were still campagining in June” when she chastises us by saying “people have short memories. Primary contests used to last a lot longer.” To take that at face value and actually believe her rationale is to drink her Kool-aid, because those nomination battles weren’t the real long, protracted primary fights when you look at things in a historical perspective. No, she had invoked Bill Clinton and RFK to place herself in the same narrative that she was just like them, a deliberate spin implying that she was also a nominee who fought the Democratic establishment and eventually won the heart of the party, despite the fact that she herself was the DLC establishment candidate. Her followers aren’t rooting for a charismatic underdog like Bill Clinton or RFK — they’re rooting for an “inevitable” frontrunner who bungled her campaign badly and lost. And with her latest RFK assassination remarks, she delivered her campaign spin completely ham-fistedly and wound up being hoisted by her own petard. Schadenfreude, anyone?
Anyway, the media will be playing her remarks non-stop over the weekend (just as they did with Wright, etc.), but it isn’t even one of the top two real nomination stories leading into the weekend. The biggest is “The Cardoza 40″, a group of largely California superdelegates who have previously endorsed Clinton but will be defecting to endorse Obama in the coming weeks. (Al Giordano who broke this story also broke Obama’s Kerry, Kennedy, and Edwards endorsements before the MSM did and has had two superdelegates contributing to his site in the past, so he is considered a credible source and this story has been hitting the political blogs big.) Cardoza declared in his endorsement: “I am deeply concerned about the contentious primary campaign and controversy surrounding the seating of delegates from Florida and Michigan – two states Democrats need to win in November. I will not support changing the rules in the fourth quarter of this contest through some convoluted DNC rules committee process.” It’s a signal that rather than winning her more superdelegate support, Clinton’s powerplay for Michgan and Florida has instead closed her final “path” to the nomination with the superdelegates (which was alway an illusion, since superdelegates won’t overturn a pledged delegate victory). The other story is Obama’s major policy speech in Miami on his Cuba and South American policies, which will have a large reception in the Spanish-language media. “Assassinate-gate” isn’t really news — it’s just the noise of the MSM gawking at what is increasingly becoming a Hillary Clinton trainwreck. Before this primary season had begun, I doubt anyone had predicted that this would be the way she’d be ending her campaign. It’s going to be a very long summer for her and her supporters.
Obama, on the other hand, has slowed his superdelegate endorsements down to a trickle in recent days, leading to the speculation that he’s gaming the delegate count so that the pledged delegates from final June 3rd primaries will be what finally pushes him over the post-Florida/Michigan pledged+unpledged delegate “magic number” to officially seal the nomination. This would be understandable, considering that the Obama campaign would prefer not to appear that it was superdelegates who pushed him over the top (even though he’s already won a majority of the pledged delegates) and no superdelegate wants to be the one to do it, either. If Obama does indeed work the numbers to make this happen according to the alleged script, then it’ll be a fitting capstone to his primary campaign and yet another masterful piece of political stagecraft that would make the “Mission Accomplished” people seethe with jealousy. Then the rest of the superdelegates will endorse en masse between June 4th and June 10th (including the Pelosi club and the remainder of the Cardoza 40) in a sign of rallying around the nominee, and Clinton will choose how she makes her exit — or not, if she decides to hopelessly continue by appealing the May 31st ruling. Whether Obama nails the delegate totals on the nose on primary night or not, I’ll be saving some popcorn for his speech marking the end of the primary season. Instead of Chicago, perhaps he’ll have the chutzpah to deliver the speech from Denver itself. It promises to be a good one.
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It still seems to me that the fundamental issue (racism in America) is just not being directly talked about. Why are we so scared of the topic?
I think Obama is talking directly about it
I agree, he did try to but it seems his attempt got covered up (in the news at least) and smothered about him being “elitist” and etc., and then back to the focus on the process of election rather than issues.