Let me state up front that I cast my ballot for president in the Feb. 5 primary in Illinois for Barack Obama and the requisite delegates. Nothing that has happened since mak
es me regret my vote and I believe the Democratic Party (and the nation) is best able to move forward if Obama is the person who winds up in the White House.But I believe the people who are trying to pressure Hillary Clinton to get out of the primary fight for the Democratic presidential nomination are being ridiculous. She has earned the right to be in the running for president, even if she wants to take the fight all the way to the nominating convention in Denver in late August.
I WILL BE the first to concede that there is a sizable number of people in this country who seriously believe that Clinton the second is a necessity as president if this country is to undo the damage that has occurred during the eight years that Bush the younger has served as president.
Many of these people see a Clinton successor to Bush as a way of framing his presidency as an accident, of sorts, that occurred in the middle of the Clinton era. It diminishes the significance of his eight years in office, and enhances the importance of the Clinton legacy.
Perhaps in their minds, it even diminishes the importance to Bill Clinton’s legacy that he got caught doing something naughty with an intern (and I don’t care if Chelsea will get offended that anybody dares bring that up – it happened, and no amount of indignation on her part can change that).
There also are those people who would take a great pride in seeing the United States show evidence of moving forward by selecting a woman to be its chief executive, and many of those people are upset that the “first female president” angle is buried under all the hype of Obama-mania.
I THINK CLINTON backers overestimate the importance of being able to try to frame history (historic legacies have a knack of taking care of themselves, no matter how much we try to stage things to appear a certain way).
But while I don’t want her to win the primary in part because I don’t want to relive the 1990s, I think it is wrong to try to cast her out of the political fight.
The fact is that she is winning significant numbers of delegates and is not running that far behind Obama – even if it is highly unlikely that she will surpass him in either delegate count or the popular vote.
A bare majority of delegates is what is needed for a candidate to take the party’s nomination, and the fact that Obama has the lead (and likely still will come mid-June when all the primaries and caucuses are over) will not change the fact that he won’t have enough to win.
HE IS BARELY leading, but has been unable to clinch the victory. So any talk that this race should be over and Clinton should step down is silly.
Want a baseball analogy? It’s the middle of the eighth inning, and Obama only has a 1-run lead. She could still come from behind to tie it up and send it into extra innings (the political equivalent of which is having the super-delegates decide the matter at the convention in August).
Why is it so ridiculous that the nominating convention actually be used to decide who gets the nomination? Quite frankly, the problem with presidential conventions in recent years is that they have become little more than over-glorified pep rallies for the presidential front-runners.
The 1996 conventions were particularly dull. Bill Clinton ran unopposed, while Bob Dole clinched the GOP nomination so early that there was nothing left for delegates to do in San Diego except lap up the sunshine and stuff themselves with fish tacos (I actually know someone who claims that was what he literally did to pass the time away that convention).
THE IDEA THAT delegates chosen from every state and territory of the United States will gather in Denver to decide who should represent their party for president – with the best man (or woman) winning. That sounds to me like Democracy at work. That sounds to me like what our political system is supposed to be.
To quote Mr. Dooley, “politics ain’t beanbag.” It’s not supposed to be pretty. This year in particular, it isn’t. The fact that the Obama/Clinton political primary has become so ugly is evidence that the American people have taken to caring about these two candidates.
Unfortunately, reality sets in. There can be only one winner. There will always be some people who get disappointed because their preferred candidate didn’t win.
Now some people are getting worked up over the latest poll by Gallup that shows 28 percent of Clinton’s supporters would rather vote for Republican John McCain instead of Obama, if he wins the Democratic nomination.
THAT SAME POLL shows 19 percent of Barack backers saying they would vote for McCain if Hillary gets the nomination. It also shows 20 percent of Republicans won’t vote for McCain (11 percent would pick the Democrat, while 9 percent would refuse to vote).
Of course, that same poll also showed that 59 percent of Clinton backers saying they would stay loyal to the Democratic Party – regardless of who wins the nomination.
There’s also the chance that many of the people who are now saying they would vote GOP will not be able to bring themselves to commit such a shameful act come Nov. 4 – the Gallup group noted that in presidential elections from 1992 to 2004, only 10 percent of all voters flipped to the candidate of the other political party because they didn’t like who their party chose.
All these numbers really mean is that this year, the American people are enamored of the presidential candidates. They care. It isn’t like a 1992 repeat, where the only thing that really made that presidential campaign interesting was the entrance of Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot into the mix.
GEORGE BUSH THE elder vs. Bill Clinton would have been deadly dull, despite the attempts of Republican attack dogs to make Clinton out to be a draft-dodging, over-sexed, aging hippie (my fingers trembled even typing such ridiculous rhetoric).
This is going to be the election cycle that we will tell our children and grandchildren about years from now. They’re going to want to know whether we were Barack backers or a part of Camp Clinton (or were we among the deluded dozens who seriously believed Fred Thompson was worthy of the White House).
Election ’04 – the Democratic primary – is a story for the history books (I think the general election will be anti-climactic, too many people hate Bush the younger and will take it out on McCain). It is likely that this primary and the after-election court battle in the 2000 presidential campaign will be the two electoral stories of our lifetimes that will be long-remembered.
Why would anyone in his right mind want to bring this story to a premature end?
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EDITOR’S NOTES: Does anybody seriously believe Hillary Clinton would give up a U.S. Senate seat (http://www.newsweek.com/id/129399) for the chance to live and work in Albany, N.Y.?
Are Barack Obama’s followers the ultimate male chauvinists? Some foreign observers (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/30/whillary130.xml) seem to think so.
Hillary Clinton, during this recent campaign event in Blue Bell, Penn., is trying to keep the support of one of the demographic groups that is keeping her presidential campaign viable. Photograph provided by Hillary Clinton for president.
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