Working Class Heroine
It was far too beautiful a day in Southern California to have spent much time following the West Virginia primary. Taking a
late afternoon bike ride is when I finally tuned into the results -- just in time to hear Hillary's victory crow.
What a humdinger! She more or less lifted Jesse Jackson's who-cleans-the-bedpans speech from twenty years ago. Or was it more like Warren Beatty's great scene in Reds when, in character as John Reed, he excitedly vows to a crowd of ruddy-cheeked Russian toilers that American workers are now joining him in world revolution! All hail Comrade Clinton who fights against all odds and all enemies to defend the orderlies, the bus drivers, the waitresses, the coal miners and, presumably, the Kronstadt sailors!
OK, just one more moment of American political pathology, I suppose. But essentially harmless...and pointless. I listened for a solid hour to CNN and NPR and MSNBC and XM Potus '08 during
which a whole lot of supposed adults tried their best to pretend that there was still some suspense left in this race.
There is none. And we all know it. And even I, at this point, am getting kinda tired of writing it. Maybe I should just set up a MS Word macro that automatically types out the boilerplate graph explaining why this is all one prolonged fantasy.
Natch, the only real question is the one we've been gnawing on now day after day. What does Hillary really think she's doing? Does she have some grand strategy none of us are smart enough to decipher? Or is she just bonkers?
Those who spend any time reading this blog know I'm actually closer to a third camp on this question i.e. that Hilary's more sinister than deluded. David Corn has put up a good piece with a theory I floated a few days ago -- that it's all about a big I-Told-You-So. And about 2012. Says David:
The Clinton camp has contended that white, lunch-pail voters are essential to Democratic victory in critical states, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. And Clinton has promised that she will win West Virginia in the general election if she is her party's nominee, noting that no Democrat in recent decades has won the White House without bagging the Mountain State. (As if she can make such a promise.) But by winning West Virginia and Kentucky (which holds its primary on May 20), she can solidify her standing as the Dem preferred by white, blue-collar voters. And if Obama falls short on November 4, she will have all those voters standing behind her when she says....well, you know.
So remaining in the race may be more than just a matter of pride, money, or desire. It may be a calculation that looks past 2008 and to Hillary Clinton's next big thing.
Read his entire piece before sounding off.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Deep down, I still expect Hillary Clinton to be the next President. I think that Corn’s first option is the most likely–she’s hanging around in case something happens, and if it doesn’t, she’ll invent something.
Never, never, never count out the Clinton’s, and never be surprised as to the depths that they will go to win. If it helped, she would back the company distributing the Obama t-shirts with a picture of Curious George on them, and she might be jealous that she didn’t think of it first.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Marc sez: “I listened for a solid hour to CNN and NPR and MSNBC and XM Potus ‘08 duringclitnonunion.jpg which a whole lot of supposed adults tried their best to pretend that there was still some suspense left in this race.”
Let’s not forget that the television media in particular have a vested interest in pretending that the campaign is still undecided. They have enjoyed some of the highest ratings in history and are loathe to lose them.
May 13th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Jeffrey St. Clair was without a doubt the first to float this theme, back in March..
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair03242008.html
May 13th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Aber mein Fuhrer….
LOL.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
The” Kronstadt sailors!”
Great stuff.
Shillary will shoot ‘em, too.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:25 am
“Deep down, I still expect Hillary Clinton to be the next President.”
I swear to god Woody’s going to miss his hobby horse just as much as Taylor Marsh and NYNow.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:47 am
Incidentally, the Childers victory in Mississippi’s 1st Congressional special election was by 8 points in a 10+ GOP stronghold. Which is amazing. If I were Woody I’d be more disturbed by that than fantasies of Hillary hiding under my bed. During the earlier primary race, Childers was the only candidate among Dems and GOPers to favor a policy of withdrawal from Iraq. Although he touts himself as a “conservative Democrat” he looks pretty solid and reasonably liberal on the issues - certainly by the standards of red-state Democrats fighting uphill battles. His “conservatism” seems to be mostly fiscal and the fact that he’s a Baptist. The RNC used all of the anti-Obama, “Rev. Wright” ammunition against him in one of their strongholds where that stuff should have had some punch.
All of the attention to the presidential primary might well be concealing the real story on the ground in 2008. Despite the Obama-Hillary emotions rising to the top among lots of supporters, the fact that people were drawn to the Democratic primaries in massive numbers probably tells us more about what’s up for November than the increasingly irrelevant tussle at the top of the ticket.
Time to move on. McCain’s the only target worth our while at this point. I’ll add that if mainstream Democrats perceive Hillary as having played spoiler in 2008, she’ll be toast politically. it’s already obvious from the Senate endorsements that a lot of her peers in the party don’t have much love for the Clintons. If, once she concedes in the next couple of weeks, there is any appearance that the Clintons aren’t doing whatever they can to help a Democratic sweep in November, I’ll go so far as to say that her Senate seat will be in jeopardy, much less any presidential ambitions for 2012. And if the Clintons DO make a real effort to help Obama make inroads their own strongest constituencies (let’s call it the “bitter” vote) he’s even more likely to beat McCain.
May 14th, 2008 at 5:24 am
reg, nothing would thrill me more than having a seemingly honest Democrat run for President rather than a known psycho-liar. The below article was written in March, but it adds an idea of what could happen in the congressional contests as she continues her race campaign, which isn’t what you predict.
Hillary’s Berserker Campaign … for 2012 By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
The fallout from Ms. Clinton’s racially-tinged blitz against Obama will spread far and wide across her party like the toxic particles from a nuclear blast. They’ve done it all before. The Clintons’ reckless first two years in the White House, from the heavy-handed Travel Office fiasco to the fires of Waco and HRC’s sophomoric bungling of the health care reform, spurred the GOP takeover of congress in 1994, which they used to their political profit. Then in 1996, Clinton refused to allocate DNC money to tight senate and congressional races, a miserly tactic that allowed the faltering Republicans to retain control of both houses of Congress. It was a cynical decision that many high-ranking Democrats believe constituted a deliberate sabotage of the party’s prospects, designed to secure a monopoly-like control of the party apparatus for the Clintons, turning the DNC into their own private PAC.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:40 am
i agree that the Clintons would be the worst thing from the standpoint of the congressional races. One of the reasons I’ve been for Obama.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Woody and I are on the same page lately. It must be the year of 13 moons.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Now that Obama has the nomination locked up, it is time to start taking him to task for some of his own positions. I do so today on my blog.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Well, thanks Marc. I’m going to sleep really well with that image rolling around in my head.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:01 am
All I can say, Michael, is that having sewed up the support of Hamas on the one side and Marty Peretz on the other, I expect him to easily resolve the Israeli-Palestinian thing by the spring of ‘09.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Good one, reg. btw, how about Jimmy Carter for secretary of state? He is more qualified than anyone else on the horizon.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
“Let’s not forget that the television media in particular have a vested interest in pretending that the campaign is still undecided. They have enjoyed some of the highest ratings in history and are loathe to lose them.”
Is that why Russert and Matthews have essentially called the race?
May 14th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
“Good one, reg. btw, how about Jimmy Carter for secretary of state? He is more qualified than anyone else on the horizon.”
Speaking of Jimmeh and the rest of The Elders, where the hell are they when they can be useful, like in Zimbabwe or Burma?
May 14th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
It’s nice to have bob williams here so we know what Woody would be like without the sense of humor and the occasional wit.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Bob Williams keeps me laughing with his one liners. But, sincerely, one difference is that Bob Williams is smarter.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Hey Balter:
I wasn’t trying to be funny. You made the ludicrous claim that the media is trying to prolong the race because it gives them something to do. I countered that they have been saying Hillary is finished since she won Indiana.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
NARAL endorsed Obama today and was immediately publicly denounced…by Emily’s List. The gender-identity crowd have gone totally off the deep end.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Williams: She has been finished for months and the horse race motif has ruled without a break.
May 14th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Ironic that Hillary Clinton has demonstrated the bankruptcy of racial politics and gender politics in the course of one campaign, but we can thank her for it in the end.
May 14th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Sen. Edwards just endorsed Obama. I guess he saw the tipping point coming where he would completely lose leverage, so he had to act now.
May 14th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Obama seems to be a male supremacist. If he really wants to dump his female support, he should keep doing this:
From the New York Times:
Back in Pennsylvania in early April, Senator Barack Obama took some heat for calling a female factory worker “sweetie,†in Allentown.
He did it again today at a Chrysler Plant in Sterling Heights, asking a reporter to “hold on one second there sweetie†when she asked, “How are you going to help the American auto workers?â€
“This sweetie never did get an answer to the question,’’ the reporter told her viewers on the local channel 7.
May 14th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Edwards endorsed Obama? Now isn’t that typical, men sticking together–pigs!
May 14th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Anyone who thinks either Bill or Hillary Clinton will campaign “fiercely” for the Obama ticket is deluded. Much as Hillary is basking in the perception that she is a hero of hard-working American white people, I suspect we will be seeing her on a tour of women’s professional groups and others who can be expected to express outrage that she is not at the top of the ticket. She will just shrug and smirk. Her version of backing Obama will be to speak ill of George Bush and John McCain. I don’t expect the subject of her “deep admiration for Senator Obama” to come up much.
May 14th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
If Hillary and Bill do sit out the campaign sulking over their loss, they won’t have many women joining them. NARAL didn’t endorse Obama for the fun of it–McCain is a serious threat to reproductive rights and no one is going to give up their womb to spite their, um, whatever.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Interesting to see whitey haters spend hours ruminating over the problem hillbillies who refuse to support the freshman Senator from Illinois, while never talking about how pathetically bad Obama does with Latinos.
Do Latinos need to go to racial reeducation camps, too? Or just the hillbillies?
May 14th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Okay, can we just step back a moment? We’ve just had a primary campaign between two candidates who for various reasons had a great deal of appeal to their supporters. Now we have a winner. Is there any doubt that most Latinos, women, white Democrats, etc etc etc will vote for Obama for the very good reason that he embodies their politics and their values much more than McCain does? But some people, like White Cornerback and Andrea Hackett, are always going to be fighting the last war. That’s so January 2008.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
The fact that Edwards just endorsed Obama and threw his delegates his way, that Obama is getting more endorsements from political action organizations, that Obama is getting more superdelegates, that Obama just took the wind out of Clinton’s win in West Virgina, and that Obama has an insurmountable lead will make Hillary Clinton’s victory seem all that more impressive.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
My understanding, Woody, is that she’s going to accept the nomination while riding a unicycle, balancing a soccer ball on her nose and juggling flaming swords.
May 14th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
“balancing a soccer ball on her nose”
Arp, arp.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Someone needs to give the Clintons a couple of Branch Davidians to slaughter, to cool their jets.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Want to read some seriously deranged Hillary Cultist ranting? read here
May 15th, 2008 at 8:18 am
>Someone needs to give the
>Clintons a couple of Branch
>Davidians to slaughter, to cool their jets.
Make them brain damaged Sudanese Branch Davidians and Hillary Wal-Mart (r) Clinton will forget all about politics…
Sorry, just had to get one more dig in at HWMC before it’s too late
May 15th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Don’t forget to toss 500,000 Iraqis into the mix, and a secretary of state who thinks their death was “worth it,” not to mention Rwandans.
May 17th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Hillary’s not so subtle argument is wrong.
She would not beat McCain with white working class voters, either.
In fact, they both trail McCain by about the same margin.
But she will be out of this “race” in fairly short order.
She’s on a glide path now.
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