MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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HRC

(A)n ex-parrot?

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This is a cruel, cruel and sad story. Usually, I would quote the beginning of a story. In this case, I will quote the end and you, dear readers, will have to follow the link to the Washington Post to figure out how it all started.

Customer: “He’s not pining! He’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! He’s expired and gone to meet his maker! He’s a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace! . . . His metabolic processes are now history! He’s off the twig! He’s kicked the bucket, he’s shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible! This is an ex-parrot!”

9:06 p.m., still in the South Hall: The announcer has just introduced “the next president of the United States.” And with the TV now turned off, it almost seems possible. The confetti guns are loaded and ready. The streamers hang from the ceiling. And the crowd — now up to 500, all but about 10 of them white — is rapturous as Clinton rebukes the “pundits and the naysayers.”

“There are some who wanted to cut this race short!” Clinton says from the faux-wood lectern. They boo.

“I am more determined than ever to carry on this campaign,” she says. They cheer.

“There are many who wanted to declare a nominee before the ballots were counted or even cast,” she says. They boo.

“This race isn’t over yet,” she says. They cheer.

The sound system emits a loud screech of feedback. The confetti cannons fire.

See? She wasn’t dead; she was just pining for the fiords.

Hillary's agony

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Is She a Trojan Rabbit? By MAUREEN DOWD, NYT Op-Ed Columnist, May 11, 2008

If Hillary Clinton were to become Barack Obama’s vice president, would she take the back seat or would she just always be plotting, draining him of his magical powers?

My own two cents, not Ms. Dowd’s? Yes, she will. Hillary, if she accomplishes her electoral goal, would become the Ma Barker of American politics. She is about to rob the nation of Hope. If she could not win it outright, she wants to kill it in its crib.

Now Barack Obama faces a true dilemma: how best to punish Hillary Clinton.

After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual, mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been trying to do to him: putting her in her place.

Her last resort is to continue to press the “Psssst — he’s a black man” tactic. She insisted to USAToday, after the North Carolina and Indiana slide, that she has a broader base, citing an Associated Press article “that found how Senator 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.”

So how does Obama repay Hillary for running a campaign designed both to unman him and brand him as an unelectable black? Is the most ingenious way to turn the screw by not choosing her as his running mate, or by choosing her?

It is, verily, a sticky wicket.

Road to oblivion

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Party Like It’s 2008 By FRANK RICH, NYT Op-Ed Columnist, May 11, 2008

ANOTHER weekly do-or-die primary battle, another round of wildly predicted “game changers” that collapsed in the locker room.

Hillary Clinton’s attempt to impersonate a Nascar-lovin’, gun-totin’, economist-bashin’ populist went bust: Asked which candidate most “shares your values,” voters in both North Carolina and Indiana exit polls opted instead for the elite and condescending arugula-eater. Bill Clinton’s small-town barnstorming tour, hailed as a revival of old-time Bubba bonhomie, proved to be yet another sabotage of his wife, whipping up false expectations for her disastrous showing in North Carolina. Barack Obama’s final, undercaffeinated debate performance, not to mention the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s attempted character assassination, failed to slow his inexorable path to the Democratic nomination.

“It’s still early,” Mrs. Clinton said on Wednesday. Though it’s way too late for her, she’s half-right. We’re only at the end of the beginning of this extraordinary election year. While we wait out her self-immolating exit, it’s a good time to pause the 24/7 roller coaster for a second and get our bearings. The reason that politicians and the press have gotten so much so wrong is that we keep forgetting what year it is. Only if we reboot to 2008 will the long march to November start making sense.

This is not 1968, when the country was so divided over race and war that cities and campuses exploded in violence. If you have any doubts, just look (to take a recent example) at the restrained response by New Yorkers, protestors included, to the acquittal of three police officers in the 50-bullet shooting death of an unarmed black man, Sean Bell.

This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts of modest political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent vice president running for the Gipper’s third term. This is not the 1998 midterms, when the Teflon Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks.

Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.

The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe. Of course we’re in pain. More voters think the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president that any living American has known.

And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all the campaign’s acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.

Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man.

For five years boomers have been asking, “Why are the kids not in the streets screaming about the war the way we were?” The simple answer: no draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in “Millennial Makeover,” their book about the post-1982 American generation, that energy has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew how to work it. The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.

The demographic reshaping of the electoral map, though more widely noted, still isn’t fully understood. From Rust Belt Ohio through Tuesday’s primaries, cable bloviators have been fixated on the older, white, working-class vote. Their unspoken (and truly condescending) assumption, lately embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that these voters are Reagan Democrats, cryogenically frozen since 1980, who come in two flavors: rubes who will be duped by a politician backing a gas-tax pander or racists who are out of Mr. Obama’s reach.

Guess what: there are racists in America and, yes, the occasional rubes (even among Obama voters). Some of them may reside in Indiana, which hasn’t voted for a national Democratic ticket since 1964. But there are many more white working-class voters, both Clinton and Obama supporters, who prefer Democratic policies after seven years of G.O.P. failure. And there is little evidence to suggest that there are enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall.

As the Times columnist Charles Blow charted last weekend, Mr. Obama’s favorable and unfavorable ratings from white Democrats are both up 5 points since last summer in the Times/CBS poll — a wash despite all the hyperventilating about Mr. Wright and Bittergate. (By contrast, Mrs. Clinton’s favorable rating among black voters fell 36 points while her unfavorable rating rose 17.) Gallup last week found that after the Wright circus Mr. Obama’s white support in a matchup against Mr. McCain is still no worse than John Kerry’s against President Bush in 2004.

But this isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted for 18 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.

Good as this demographic shift is for a Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama, it’s even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can’t surf to a right-wing blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.

This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans) unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in Louisiana fell to a Democrat last weekend, despite a campaign by his opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.

A few conservatives do realize the game has changed. George Will wrote last week that Mr. Obama was Reaganesque in the stylistic sense that “his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness — the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.” John and Cindy McCain get it too, which is why both last week made a point (he on “The Daily Show,” she on “Today”) of condemning negative campaigning. But even if Mr. McCain keeps his word and stops trying to portray Mr. Obama as the man from Hamas, he can’t disown the Limbaugh axis of right-wing race-mongering. That’s what’s left of his party’s base.

Now that the Obama-Clinton race is over, the new Beltway narrative has it that Mr. McCain, a likable “maverick” (who supported Mr. Bush in 95 percent of his votes last year, according to Congressional Quarterly), might override the war, the economy, Bush-loathing and the bankrupt Republican brand to be competitive with Mr. Obama. Anything can happen in politics, including real potential game changers, from Mr. McCain’s still-unreleased health records to new excavations of Mr. Obama’s history in Chicago. But as long as the likely Democratic nominee keeps partying like it’s 2008 while everyone else refights the battles of yesteryear, he will continue to be underestimated every step of the way.

What we sow

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Seeds of Destruction By BOB HERBERT, NYT Op-Ed Columnist, May 10, 2008

The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.

Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.

(Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who is black and has been an absolutely unwavering supporter of Senator Clinton’s White House quest, told The Daily News: “I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.”)

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.

I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.

Continue . . .

More like the Hindenburg

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Hillary Rodham Clinton biographer Carl Bernstein has a fascinating post at cnn.com about her plan to land the vice-presidential spot on the Obama ticket. Titled Could Clinton land the VP nomination?, her plan to end her campaign and win the vice presidential spot is to blackmail and threaten Obama:

Take me on as your vice president, or I’ll destroy you and the Democratic Party.

Bernstein wrote that HRC’s minions are still, remarkably, trolling for dirt to destroy the Obama campaign with, even as they vigorously seek the second spot on the ticket:

A person close to her, with whom her campaign staff has counseled at various points, said this week, “I think the following will happen: Obama will be in a position where the party declares him the nominee by the first week in June. She’ll still be fighting with everybody — the Rules Committee, the party leaders — and arguing, ‘I’m winning these key states; I’ve got almost half the delegates. I have a whole constituency he hasn’t reached. I’ve got real differences on approach to how we win this election, and I’m going to press the hell out of this guy. … Relief for the middle class, universal health care, etc.; I’m Ms. Blue Collar, and I’m going to press my fight, because he can’t win without my being on the ticket.’ “

Another major Democratic Party figure, who supports her for president, agreed: “It’s not going to be a quiet exit. … Obama has got a terrible situation. He marches to a different drummer. He won’t want to take her on the ticket. But he might have to, even though the idea of Vice President Hillary with Bill in the background at the White House is not something — especially after what [the Clintons] have thrown at him that he relishes. I believe she’ll go for it.”

However, several important Democrats aligned with Obama predicted that he — and Michelle Obama — will vigorously resist any Clinton effort to get on the ticket. Rather, Obama is more likely to try to convince Clinton to either stay in the Senate or accept another position in an Obama administration, should he win the presidency.

Several Clinton associates say there is still a ray of hope among some in her campaign: that a “catastrophic” revelation about Obama might make it possible for her to win the presidential nomination. But barring that, Hillary and Bill Clinton recognize that her candidacy is being abandoned and rejected by superdelegates whom she once expected to win over and that, even if she were to win the popular vote in combined primary states, she will almost certainly be denied the nomination.

This is mind boggling. HRC has lost and her ship is losing water. Yet she is still making threats. There are other people who help Obama, if he even needs this help, with the so-called blue collar, “hard-working” white voters. Jim Webb, as I’ve stated on a number of occasions, for instance.

HRC is a disaster. Bill Clinton has turned out to be a disaster for Democrats. They both need to go away. The sooner the better.

Their true colors

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(Mark Lennihan/Associated Press) The New York Post’s Wednesday morning headline.

I do not want to waste any more breath on that beautiful dream (before the winks and nods to racist tactics, the say-anything-do-anything strategy to win) that was the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States.

By all rational measures, she is now finished, “toast,” in the inimitable word of the New York Post. Just try telling that to her, or that hidebound husband of hers, Bill Clinton.

“I’m staying in this race until there is a nominee,” HRC proclaimed on Wednesday.

Some wonder why she does not put the good of the party before her own ambition. Why would she want to damage the almost certain nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, and swing the race to Sen. John McCain by persisting? Some see keeping Obama from the presidency is keeping the way clear so she could run again in 2012.
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