THE SYSTOCRAT PAPERS

A particularly troubling debate has been quietly simmering in the blogoshpere this week.  Apparently, some folks think that Hillary, aware that her 2008 bid for the presidency is likely to end in failure, is now actively and deliberately sabotaging Obama’s chances in November to leave the way open for her to run again in 2012, while others think that she is a “partisan animal” that would never sabotage her own party.  Michael Tomasky of Guardian America summarized this debate yesterday and offered the following editorial commentary: 

“But she will think about her own future as well as the party's? This is the point where others might start talking about Clintonian selfishness and ruthlessness and ambition and so on. But I say, why shouldn't she think of her own future? Who in the same situation wouldn't think of her own future?

To do so would not mark her as especially conniving. I've covered many comparable situations, mostly in New York politics - mayoral and senate elections, say. And I'm here to tell you that in every single case in which I had a frank, off-the-record discussion with either the candidate or key staff, the losing campaign was, how to put it, inclined to see a silver lining in the defeat of his opponent who had won the nomination. “

Mr. Tomasky qualifies these comments by stating that it is okay for Hillary to think about an Obama defeat in November, so long as she doesn’t act on these thoughts.  Read the entire article here: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michael_tomasky/2008/03/hillary_2012.html

I offer no opinion here on whether or not these allegations about Hillary are true.  Quite frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were, I suppose, given the tone of Hillary’s campaign as of late.  But there’s really no way to know for sure.

Although Mr. Tomasky is clearly not condoning such selfish behavior, he has nonetheless summed up the fundamental problem with American politics.  Self-interest is an acceptable lodestar for American politicians, the best interests of constituencies and the party be damned.  Special interests rule the roost in Washington for exactly this reason – because politicians are willing, and in some cases eager, to sell out their constituents in favor of some benefit to themselves, be it campaign financing, kickbacks, etc.  Meanwhile, the rest of us look forward to gas prices topping $4 a gallon, increasing levels of unemployment, increasing costs of health care, and to seeing more of our sons and daughters perish overseas in unjustified military conflicts, just to name a few of the issues on the minds of Americans in 2008.

Regardless of what her motivation is, this is exactly what Hillary is doing now – selling out her perspective constituents.  By continuing her destructive campaign against Obama when her chances of victory are slim to none, she is abandoning the interests of the people she claims that she’ll fight for when she’s President in favor of her desire to attain the office for herself at all costs. 

In this regard and in the context of this debate, I find myself agreeing with Jonathan Chait of the New Republic, who had this to say on the issue:

“An easier question to answer is, How much does Clinton value her own interests versus those of the Democratic Party? And here the answer is very clear: Clinton is acting as if she doesn't care about the Democratic Party's interests at all, except insofar as they coincide with her own. Her continued campaign is significantly damaging Obama's general election prospects, and this would perhaps be defensible if she had a strong chance at the nomination, but she doesn't. As Politico recently reported, "One important Clinton advisor estimated to Politico privately that she has no more than a 10 percent chance of winning her race against Barack Obama, an appraisal that was echoed by other operatives."

To inflict serious damage on the likely nominee in order to pursue a one-in-ten chance of securing the nomination is, ipso facto, an act of extreme selfishness. Whether she sees the damage to Obama's prospects as a feature or a bug is interesting but beside the point”

As Hillary has often noted on the campaign trail, the President of the United States is the "most powerful office in the world," with the ability to shape policy decisions that will affect millions, if not billions of people, both in this country and beyond.  Shouldn't a person seeking to assume this office demonstrate, both by words and action, that they are willing to give top priority to the interests of the people? 

Posted by Tom Douglas at 08:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Those of you who are wondering why Obama can't deliver the knockout blow to Hillary's campaign are misapprehending the true nature of the dilemma.  The real question is, how do you knock a zombie out of a tough political contest without compromising your principles and potentially hurting your own chances?  We all know that ordinary candidates are relatively easy to dispatch.  You out-inspire and out-stump them.  You outspend and out-advertise them.  Nothing to it, really.  With zombies, however, things are a bit more complicated. 

According to Wikipedia, a zombie is a "reanimated corpse . . . Typically, these creatures can sustain damage far beyond that of a normal, living human . . . "  Like a zombie, Hillary's campaign was dead, but has now apparently been reanimated by her victory in Pennsylvania.  Also like a zombie, she apparently needs none of the things that a non-zombie candidate would require in order to keep her campaign lurching forward, like new donors, or balance sheets that are in the black, or even a reasonable chance to secure victory at the convention in August by above-board means. 

Yeah, she's a zombie, albeit one of the most articulate, well informed and energetic zombies ever to appear on the national stage.  The truth is that lately she's never looked more human.  Hillary does the best zombie-impersonation of a real live candidate that I've ever seen, and voters, especially women and older folks, are really buying her act. 

The folks in the best position to expose Hillary's zombified, undead status are the Republican talking heads, since the GOP has several zombies in their ranks these days, including one big stupid zombie in the White House.  But we also know that these GOP mouthpieces wouldn't be caught dead with a zombie-exposing whistle between their lips.   To the contrary, the Pat Buchanans and Joe Scarboroughs of the world are literally climbing over each other to reassure Democrats in the remaining primary states that she's NOT a zombie, and that she's still got a real shot at this thing, presumably in order to prolong the Democrats' nominating contest as long as "humanly" possible, if you'll pardon the expression.

Let me assure you that this is no laughing matter.  Zombie-Hillary presents two big problems for Obama.  First, all the zombie experts I've spoken to confirm that it takes an extraordinary ass-kicking to put zombies out of commission for good.  You can't just kill them, since they're already dead.  Essentially, you need to dismember a zombie campaign, limb from limb, and scatter the parts to the four winds so that it can't reconstitute itself when you're not looking.  Obama, with his squeaky clean campaign strategies, politics of hope and purported lack of killer instincts, may not be situated to put the necessary smackdown on this unusually tough zombie without compromising his principles and turning off Democrats, who expect better of him.  He can't afford to go negative and risk dividing the party, and his usual shtick doesn't seem to be delivering the much anticipated knockout blow. 

The bigger problem, not addressed anywhere in the leading zombie literature, is as follows.  Given enough external stimuli, is it possible for a zombie to regain enough vitality to overcome its undead status and re-enter the land of the living as a reconstituted flesh and blood candidate?  Exhibit A - John McCain, who was buried in an unmarked grave last summer after his campaign committed suicide with a self-inflicted stake through the heart, and who has since been reanimated to become the presumptive nominee.  It's well documented that the HRC campaign didn't have a strategy beyond Super Tuesday, and for a while Obama administered a real ass-whupping as a result.  However, HRC's halftime adjustments, although long in coming, may finally be turning the tide, and Obama needs to call timeout and reassess his strategy before the next contests in Indiana and North Carolina. 

If I were Obama, in the next week or so I'd focus all my energies on finding a winning strategy, albeit a polite, gentlemanly one, to knock Hillary-zombie out of the race with all possible speed, before she finishes transforming herself from the zombie that we've all grown used to over the last few weeks to Hillary Clinton, flesh and blood candidate.  Otherwise, both Obama and the Democrats may be facing some real trouble in the near future, in the form of an insurmountable party divide. 

Posted by Tom Douglas at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One thing I know about Pennsylvanians from my time as a Philly resident is that they have little or no tolerance for bullshit, so I'm going to get right to the point.  Just like Sly Stallone shouldn't have gone there with the sixth Rocky movie, it's time for Hillary to quit, before she fracks things up for all of us.  Any Pennsylvania voter who really wants things to improve in this country should tell Hillary to get the hell out of the race by handing her a decisive defeat on Tuesday.

This contest is over, people.  Hillary needs something on the order of 65% of all delegates in the remaining contests in order to win the nomination, which, given recent polling numbers, is simply not going to happen.  Meanwhile, she's running out of cash and her supporters stopped drinking the Kool-Aid long ago and are now moving out of the high-crime Clinton shantytown to take up residence in noticeably tidier Obama-ville.  If this were a football game, it would be first and goal for the Obama squad, up by two scores and inside the two minute warning, while HRC would be out of timeouts.  The crowd would be filing out of the stadium en masse to catch the postgame show on their car radios and eat the last cheesesteak before the drive home.  Unless HRC pulls some kind of Tonya Harding takedown on Obama between now and August, she is not going to win the nomination, period.  It's a simple matter of mathematics.

With that in mind, Pennsylvania voters must consider what, not who, they're voting for.  Every vote for Hillary prolongs a contest in which the outcome is no longer in doubt.  While this will not alter the result of the Democratic contest in all possible universes save one, it may hurt our collective chances to get an actual human being, i.e. an organism that appears to have a heart and a soul, into office.  The alternative is John McCain, who, freed from the necessity of campaigning, now hovers ominously in the distance like a dark star.  This is a guy who doesn't seem to like anyone except other rich guys, a guy who will keep us in Iraq for another 100 years despite the fact that he can't keep the players straight over there without help from Joe Lieberman, a guy who thinks there's a 50/50 chance of sending troops into Iran, a guy who called his own wife a "Cee U Next Tuesday" in front of reporters and who thinks Roe v. Wade should be overturned, a guy who voted against an MLK holiday on more than one occasion, and a guy who now favors the Bush tax cuts and who otherwise feels that working class Americans should be left to fend for themselves in hard times without benefit of government assistance and notwithstanding the fact that Washington's irresponsible policies are at least partially responsible for the current state of affairs.  Oh and by the way, the brother can't control his temper either, which is one quality that every commander-in-chief should have, especially one as hawkish as McCain.

There are millions of reasons why we should focus all of our energies on ensuring that McCain never takes office.  Despite this, HRC continues to act like an official GOP decoy, forcing Obama to waste valuable time and resources in extinguishing her desperate to-the-last-woman stand while McCain continues to tiptoe towards the finish line.  If allowed to stay in the race, Hillary's attacks on Obama will only intensify.  She knows that barring a miracle, she's going down, and as an excellent attorney at the Philadelphia Defender's Office once told me, "if one of your clients is about to go down [i.e. be taken into custody], it's a good idea to move away from that person, because there's no telling what they'll do."  HRC's campaign of late exemplifies this analysis -- she's been getting up on the down stroke since losing her aura of "inevitability" and somehow I don't think that George Clinton would approve.  She's lied (Bosnia-gate, Irish peace accords, etc., etc. etc.), attempted to cheat and steal (Michigan and Florida); and otherwise employed every negative tactic in the Clinton playbook.  She knows that the only way she can win is to bring Obama down to her level, and she has missed no opportunity to achieve this end.  The problem is that while HRC has been petulantly flinging her limbs this way and that seeking to strike a blow, she has actually managed to land a couple of punches.  If the national polls are accurate, Obama's not bleeding yet, but his face does have that just-slapped look.  Lord knows what she'll try to engineer between now and August if there's even the shadow of a chance that she can steal the nomination in Denver.

Most telling is the fact that, despite urgent calls for party unity, HRC recently lashed out at "activist" members of her own party for not endorsing her and for flooding the Obama campaign with cash and caucus states with Obama supporters, as reported recently by intrepid blogger Celeste Fremon on Huffington.  This "with us or against us" Rovian mentality is distinctly unDemocratic Party-like and otherwise most disturbing. 

The bottom line is this: if Hillary gave a damn about any of the issues that she supposedly champions, like health care reform for example, she'd bow out gracefully and work with party leadership to ensure that there might at least be a receptive ear in the White House.  Instead, she's shown herself willing to sacrifice all of us on the altar of her personal ambitions.  Why? Because she's not one of us, that's why.  If Democrats lose, she's not the one who'll be out of a job, who'll be hurt by gas prices over $4 a gallon, whose kid will be drafted to shore up our flagging military when we invade Iran during the McCain administration, and who will be turned away from the hospital for not having adequate health insurance.  To be fair, Obama would also not be personally affected by any of these things, but then, Obama's not the one dragging the Democratic Party down, and the hopes of the country with it.  As she watches a dream that she's probably coveted for her entire adult life slip away, I can certainly sympathize with her plight, but there are much larger and more important issues at stake here than her bruised ego.  For the good of the Democratic Party and the nation, she needs to step aside. 

Unfortunately, she can't win, and she can't bear to lose.  Pennsylvania voters can help make that decision for her, and they should.  Hell, even Rocky's fights had to end sometime.  Like Rocky's run in the theater, HRC's run at the Democratic nomination needs to end.

Cross-posted at The Huffington Post - Off The Bus.

Posted by Tom Douglas at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)