We’ve reached the end game:
“A friend of mine told me how the Marines train people in hand-to-hand combat,” says retired Über-consultant Bob Shrum. “If your opponent has a weapon and you don’t, you pick up an ashtray, a lamp, a chair, anything you can, and keep throwing stuff. It seems to me that’s what the Clinton campaign is doing.”
Hillary Clinton is not going to win in Texas:
SurveyUSA 2/23-25. Likely voters. MoE 3.8% (2/19 results)
Obama 49 (45)
Clinton 45 (50)Obama 50 (48)
Clinton 46 (50)Obama 50 (48)
Clinton 42 (42)
Chris Bowers assesses the options.
Will Ohio and Rhode Island be enough for Clinton to keep going? There actually is no precedent for a candidate with over 1,000 delegates dropping out before the convention, so I would not be so sure. As long as she leads in Pennsylvania polls and any delegate count, if I was on her campaign staff I would advise her to keep going.
If I were on her campaign staff I would not advise her to keep going, and I would not advise her to ‘pick up an ashtray, a lamp, a chair, anything [she] can, and keep throwing stuff.’ I’d tell her to stop all negative campaigning right now.
On one level this is kind of obvious. Barack Obama is probably going to be the next president of the United States. Hillary Clinton represents the people of New York. It’s pretty much her duty to the people of the Empire State at this point to stop alienating the next president. If she hits him with too many more chairs and ashtrays, she may discover that her phone calls to the White House go unreturned.
There’s one other scenario that Clinton might be thinking about. If Obama loses the general election, Hillary might be in a good position to run in 2012. But she’ll be in the worst possible position to run in 2012 if she gets blamed for undermining Obama’s chances. She should think back to Gore’s concession speech in 2000. Gore did more to preserve his popularity in the Democratic Party in that speech than in anything he did during the campaign. He showed humility and class, and he put his country over his personal ambition and even the short-term interests of his party.
I have to say, in all candor, that the Clintons have already self-imposed a lot of damage to their reputations. Most of it could be forgiven with a really graceful exit, but the window on a graceful exit is rapidly closing. Clinton’s sarcastic and mocking tone in Rhode Island and her campaign’s inability to condemn yesterday’s Somali Garb dustup and promise to sack the responsible staffers…let’s just say that this is not laying the right groundwork for a classy bow-out.
I tend to think about campaigns more than individual candidates, and thinking about that aspect of the race is instructive, as well. As the junior senator from New York, her ability to pass out patronage to her supporters is pretty limited. What is to become of her economic, health, labor, environmental, and foreign policy advisers? What is to become of her political consultants and operatives? If she cares about them at all, she should consider how her action might adversely affect their future influence and careers. If Obama doesn’t trust her people, he’ll probably look elsewhere to staff the federal government. If she pushes too hard and too long she risks putting her own ambition over the interests of the people that believed in and supported her.
Cynics will say that the answer is: Are you kidding? Among many in the Democratic Party, the rap on the Clintons has always been that they’re self-regarding, self-centered, infinitely narcissistic. That they see the party as a vehicle for their ambitions, nothing more and nothing less. That their preeminent cause is their own power. How Hillary conducts herself in the days ahead will speak volumes about whether that is actually true of her.
If I were advising her, I’d tell her that her future and her legacy depend on undermining that ‘rap’. She’s pushed this far, so she should probably continue campaigning through March 4th. But she should stop undermining the strengths and rationale of the Obama campaign. And when the returns come in in Texas, she should be ready with the most gracious and congratulatory concession speech that her speechwriters can dream up.
Ironically, the worst thing that could happen for her is to win the March 4th primaries, soldier on to the convention, and then lose anyway (which she inevitably would). If she does that, her name will be mud not only in this generation, but for many generations to come.
I don’t know if she can be satisfied with a career in the Senate, but she should look for guidance to Edward Kennedy, who has endured much more personal grief and professional disappointment, and yet persevered through it all to become one of America’s most legendary public servants. Hillary Clinton can do a lot worse. And, at this point, she’s unlikely to do better.