My theory on the campaign is that the Clintons cannot limp all the way to April 22nd when the logic/narrative puts them strictly in the role of party wreckers. The poison that will eventually erode Clinton’s poll advantage is the cold hard truth that she cannot win a brokered convention. But, before that poison can work its way through the body electorate, the media must begin reporting the truth. This started yesterday when Ben Smith of The Politico reported that members of Clinton’s staff privately acknowledge that she has no more than a 10% chance of winning the nomination. Mark Halperin continued the trend today when he listed Fourteen Painful Things Hillary Clinton Knows — Or Should Know. Tomorrow is Maureen Dowd’s turn to push the narrative.
It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off.
It’s impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she’ll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama’s wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.
“It’s like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over your eyes,” said one leading Democrat.
That’s a typical Dowd construction and ordinarily it wouldn’t be worth the paper it is printed on. But she closes her column with a valuable insight.
If Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi are the dealmakers, it won’t take Hercule Poirot to figure out who had knives out for Hillary in this “Murder on the Orient Express.”
Carter, who felt he was not treated with a lot of respect by the Clintons when they were in the White House, favors Obama.
“The Clintons will be there when they need you,” said a Carter friend.
Al Gore blames Bill Clinton’s trysts with Monica for losing him the White House. He resented sharing the vice presidency with Hillary and sharing the donors and attention with her when she ran for Senate as he ran for president.
“There’s no love between him and Hillary,” said one former Clintonista. “It was like Mitterrand with his wife and girlfriend. They were always competing for the affection of the big guy.”
Like Carter and Gore, Nancy Pelosi was appalled by Bill’s escapades with Monica. And, as The Times’s Carl Hulse wrote, the Speaker has been viewed as “putting her thumb on the scale for Mr. Obama” in recent weeks. As a leading China basher, the San Francisco pol tangled bitterly with President Clinton over his pursuit of a free-trade agreement with China, once charging him with papering over China’s horrible record on human rights. And she has been put off by the abrasive ways of some top Hillary people.
The Clintons are looking around and realizing that they don’t have as many friends as they thought they had. But it isn’t really important what Maureen Dowd says. What matters is that the media is now giving itself permission to write the Clintons’ epitaph. There is no way for the Clintons to stop the momentum of this narrative once it catches on in the press. Once Tim Russert starts quoting Halperin and Dowd, then everyone will start echoing the new common wisdom. It was too long in coming, but it’s too long to the Pennsylvania primary for the Clintons to maintain the fiction that they have a chance.
Now, one of the strongest articles of faith in the business is that the Clintons will never give up and they will do anything to win, even if it hands John McCain the White House on a silver platter. But even the Clintons need the support of a certain baseline percentage of the political establishment. There is no way that Hillary will be president or vice-president, but she might be able to negotiate something of value. Some people have suggested that she could be made Majority Leader of the Senate. I think that’s a long shot, mainly because of logistics (how do you get 50-plus senators to agree in advance?). Others have suggested a seat on the Supreme Court. That would be possible if the Democrats pick up a few seats in the Senate (and maybe even without it). And it would be a priceless spectacle to watch the right-wing howl in agony as she took her place on the court.
A lesser prize could be attained if Teddy Kennedy would offer her his chairmanship of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. From that perch she could be instrumental in pushing through Obama’s health care reform (although, they’d have to get the Rules Committee to give HELP jurisdiction over the bill).
I can’t really think of another prize that Clinton might want. But cabinet positions could also be up for grabs. In any case, I hope that the Clintons are taking a moment over this Easter weekend to take a realistic appraisal of their prospects and options. The media narrative isn’t going to get any friendlier, and any attacks on Obama from this point on are going to be met by increasingly resistance from the party establishment (including superdelegates).
