Hillary Clinton has no intention of going quietly into the night. She is running hard and giving it everything she has. She’s fully content to damage Barack Obama’s chances in the general election despite the impossibility of her becoming the nominee. And that’s a key point. If she had a better chance of becoming president than Mike Gravel, her antics would not be so disturbing. But she really doesn’t have a better chance than Mike Gravel. She will not get the nomination. Consider this exchange.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was asked about former President Bill Clinton’s error-riddled defense of his wife, regarding her Hemingway-esque accounting of her 1996 trip to Bosnia.
“I can’t for the life of me figure out why the president would have said it except he may have been having a late night adult moment,” Pelosi told CBS’s Bob Schieffer, “but let’s leave it at that.”
I’ve said this before, but it really is true that Clinton’s chances of being the nominee are actually diminished every time she is perceived to be unfairly attacking Obama. The reason? She can’t win the nomination on the first ballot, and her chances of winning on the second ballot are hurt if Obama’s delegates refuse to see her as an acceptable alternative. To become the nominee she needs Obama to implode, but she can’t be seen as causing that implosion…especially in a way that is seen as illegitimate.
Take a look at Clinton’s hard-hitting diatribe against Obama that she delivered today in Indiana.
I find it kind of amusing the way that Clinton casts herself as a kind of George Wallace champion of the white working man, but I’m less entertained by her assertion that Obama is an elitist that is looking down his nose at small town America. Obama’s response is strong:
PHILADELPHIA, PA – Hari Sevugan, spokesman for Obama for America, released the following statement in response to remarks delivered by Senator Clinton this morning in Indianapolis:
“We won’t be lectured on being out of touch by Senator Clinton, who believes lobbyists represent real people and is awash in their money and who can’t tell a straight story about her lengthy record of supporting trade deals like NAFTA and China that have devastated communities in Pennsylvania and Indiana. She won’t change the broken Washington system that all too often leaves American workers behind, but Barack Obama will.”
But the back and forth between the campaigns is not the point. The point is that Clinton is providing ammo for the Republicans and doing all she can to hurt Obama’s ability to attract voters that we need in the fall. The reason this is intolerable is that she has no chance of being the nominee. I know that she may believe otherwise, but her delusions are not a legitimate excuse. If she has a 2012 strategy, where she hopes that McCain wins the election so she can run against him in four years, that is even less acceptable.
These attacks are a distortion of what Obama said, and certainly of what he meant. And the Clintons know this and don’t care.
It’s a scorched earth strategy and party elders need to step in and put a stop to it.
