Dan Balz asked Democratic strategists to assess whom would be a stronger general election candidate. This assessment stuck out for me:
The most negative view came from a pro-Obama Democratic strategist. “He has a chance to be a transformational leader,” this Democrat wrote. “She has been a huge disappointment as a candidate, her campaign a depressing joyless slog through the mud, her presidency would be a disaster.”
Something just rang true in that for me. Looking at the bloggers I know that have decided to take Clinton’s side in this, ‘joyless’ stands out as about the best descriptor I can think of. They have been engaged over a very long period of time now in a kind of relentless naysaying, arguing against the Audacity of Hope, nitpicking, and apologizing for campaign tactics they’ve spent years deriding.
There is no ‘joy’ in that. It comes across as a kind of sustained petulance, often veering into gross pettiness. This can be seen in their response to Clinton’s lies about her 1996 visit to Bosnia. Clinton bloggers mechanically trot out the most banal of countercharges, as if the disputed memories of childhood are the same electoral dynamite as a YouTube that flatly contradicts concocted tales of heroism.
The Clinton campaign has been an enormous disappointment, even for those of us that never harbored it any good will. It chose the wrong message (experience) in a ‘change’ election. It chose a front-loaded ‘inevitability’ primary strategy premised more on an initial name recognition advantage than any superior political vision. It has sought, ever since Iowa, to turn Barack Obama into a ‘black Jesse Jackson-style Democrat’ and thereby marginalize him, and has thus squandered all the good will it had built over the years in the party’s most loyal voting bloc.
The Clinton campaign has not spent its money wisely. It has not put together a competent team that can stay on message, avoid leaks, and avoid becoming the story. The whole Campaign apparatus exudes a kind of ‘no we can’t’ attitude that is a severe downer. At this point, they are transparently clinging to the profoundly disturbing hope that the superdelegates will buy into the unoptimistic belief that a black man cannot win the general election. In fact, they are actually pitching that line of pessimism to the superdelegates and encouraging the media to press that storyline.
It’s a slog, and a distinctively joyless one. And it is taking a toll on the people that have decided to enlist themselves in the cause. The Clintons, much like the Bushes, seem to diminish everyone that comes into contact with them.
