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As the Democratic presidential race draws to a close in
these last weeks, it has been both comical and sad to witness the Hillary
Clinton camp’s attempts to rationalize her strategy to “tough it out”until the
last vote available is counted that seals her political coffin.
Comical because her spokepeople don’t appear
to know or care how patently silly they look crafting each of the serpentine delegate scenarios
which, we are assured, will catapult her to victory. Sad because, for all the
justified criticism of the Clintons,
it gives one no great joy to see this tarnishing of their political
legacy come about. It’s like the
reaction of partygoers to a person that stutters: people laugh, but they’re not
too happy about it . . .
One can only imagine the devastating impact this 2008 campaign
has had on Hillary Clinton. Only five months ago, she was celebrating the
Christmas season as the prohibitive favorite not only to win the Democratic
Presidential nomination, but to succeed yet another Bush with yet another
Clinton in the White House this November.
The sheer historical magnitude of it is hard to
overstate. First female President of the United States. First Husband and Wife to be elected
President separately. The inaugural First Gentleman of America. On top of that, she would be succeeding one of the most discredited Presidents in memory, having saddled the country with a hugely unpopular and incredibly costly war, a moribund
economy exacerbated by a mortgage crisis affecting millions, and a scandal-ridden Administration. Worse, the majority of this occurring under the complete Executive and legislative control of the Republican Party, whose greedy fingerprints were all over these disasters. This was a scenario unsurpassed for the Democrats, with the possible exception of the election of 1932, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal swept into office in the midst of the Great Depression. The coronation was signed, sealed, and delivered by everyone - everyone, that is, except the voters.
What the Clintons were about to find out was that, contrary to
popular opinion, the punditocracy, and various other corners of conventional
wisdom, there was an alternative to Queen Hillary—Barack Obama. The Face of Change, and in a historical
return of serve, an African-American face at that. Young, attractive, intelligent, unflappable,
with a public service pedigree from the streets of Chicago and a staggering
Internet fundraising machine, he stormed into the collective consciousness to “steal”
the nomination from Hillary, as her revisionist patrons will no doubt see it
years from now. And yet, as I’ve
maintained from the beginning of this
electoral sea change back in January, her fall is not a complete surprise. For as unique as the Obama candidacy is (although
still a story without an ending), there is now and was even before Iowa a
considerable segment of the Democratic Party base that was not so much
anti-Hillary as anti-Clinton/Bush Dynasty.
The notion that only the Bushes and Clintons
were the most qualified to lead was and is a suffocating prospect to many
Democrats. There are other Democratic
voters (such as myself) who voted twice for Bill Clinton in large part to rid
us of Reagan and to stave off what eventually George W. stole for himself in
2000, but who have not forgotten the shameful sellouts to NAFTA and the
Telecommunications Act by Bill Clinton. It is an anti-Democratic Leadership Council, anti-Triangulation, anti-Corporate
movement that is growing and that correctly identifies Bill and Hillary Clinton
as accommodationists to the corporate lobbyists ravaging the country. These populist voters want Real Democrats,
not New ones.
In the final analysis, I believe Hillary Clinton failed to
win because of one overarching reality that neither she, nor Bill, nor Mark Penn, Terry
McAuliffe, James Carville, etc., ever realized or could overcome. The unvarnished truth
is that the majority of Democratic voters in 2008 simply DID NOT WANT HER. For all her early financial advantage, her
universal name recognition, her experience, her historic candidacy, the help of
a popular ex-President, and her “inevitability," her voters did not want her.
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