Will Hillary Push the Plunger? You Know She Will.
Barack Obama and Howard Dean should be very, very concerned. It looks like Hillary Clinton means to play the primary game all the way to the bitter end, even if it means blowing up the entire party.
How can you win the nomination when the math looks so bleak for you?
It doesn’t look bleak at all. I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates, all for different reasons, and they’re all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we’re going to follow the process. [Emphasis added]
Deam and Obama may see this as a bluff. If they do, they are even less politically-adroit than they have shown themselves on the campaign trail. Hillary Clinton is a lawyer all the way to her marrow and you had better believe that she knows the delegate rules like she knows her own name. There is no doubt in my mind that she will use those rules to her very best advantage, which will likely not be in the best interest of the Democratic Party. At best, she will walk away from the convention with only a few feathers ruffled. That assumes that she spends a whole lot of time soothing irate soecial interests and big-money donors. At worst, she will blow up the party like Michael Corleone’s car.
If Obama is smart, he’ll start using Clinton’s lust for power against her on the campaign trail. He’ll ditch his empty-headed mantra of changeitudinal hopefulocity and bring a far more realistic message that he represents the very heart and soul of the Democratic party. That won’t last long, since John McCain will beat him about the head and shoulders with it after the convention, but before then, it’s going to be what saves his campaign.
(via Rich Lowry)
(cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)
Clinton is willing to destroy the Democratic Party through deception and manipulation -slash and burn - scorched earth - to steal herself the nomination. It’s not a small group of people who will work tirelessly against her should that travesty of justice come to pass. Tirelessly - Tirelessly. Mark my words… and carve them very, very deeply into cold hard blue pearl Scandinavian granite. She will pay with the November election and be driven into oblivion for her destructive self-serving display of moral contempt. Carve! - my words - deep.
Jimmie: won’t HRC be able to say. "Core of the Democratic Party? The core votes for me. The base is with me. You’re getting the support from outsiders"?
The question was directed at Jimmie but I think I have an answer to it. There’s a reason Hillary hasn’t been harping on the issue of her having the establishment Democrats and Obama being better with new voters, Independents and even some Republicans. Clinton is not a stupid woman, and she understands that pointing this out is a very bad idea. Why? Because the next logical step is to realize that Clinton has voters who will vote for the Democrat no matter what, since they are ESTABLISHMENT voters, while Obama has people who might vote for him specifically, but won’t neccesarily vote for ANY Democrat. In short, if Clinton tries to harp on the subject, she’ll only bring attention to the fact that Obama is better at getting the most hard-fought votes in general elections, the Indies. She also risks offending Independents, young people and moderate Republicans if she sneers at their votes as those of "outsiders". She’d need those "outsiders" in a general election, and she knows it.
yet more of HRC’s hypocrisy She want’s to reverse the rules for her favor but at the same time say Obama shouldn’t also
Michael,
I think that’s exactly what she’ll say and to a small extent she’ll be correct. Obama would be able to make a better claim that his vote totals prove that the base is behind him but I don’t think it’ll get a ton of traction, legally. She’s going to use the rules like a bludgeon. Poor Obama has never faced an opponent as ruthless as Clinton and he’s never been in a competetive election in his entire career. I have the distinct feeling he’s is going to wake up a couple of weeks after the convention feeling like a frat kid who wakes up after a night of partying and wonders why there’s a tattoo on his hind end that says "Lola", a sheep nuzzling his chin, and a wedding ring on his finger.
The words "voter backlash" come to mind in the general election for Hillary though. That’s the "blowing up the party" thing. These are Democrats we’re talking about, though. they’re the same folks who put Bill Clinton back into office knowing everything we knew about him and voted for his wife in huge numbers knowing everything we know about her. They may not take kindly to being reminded of how much they’re had to repress for 16 years. If she loses in the General (which I believe she will), the recriminations will be historic.
I have no doubt that the party leaders will be considering these arguments when they deliberate on how to cast their votes- but the problem for them is that the redstate/bluestate divisions are not likely to remain unchanged this year. It’s not a given that Hillary will hold all of the blue states and then flip one or more of those that went to Bush. It’s probably even less likely that Obama would hold all of the blue territory but then he has better odds of picking off a few of the purple states. I imagine the decision will come down to an analysis of which scenario is most likely to prevent McCain from keeping all of the Bush red states, or to keep him from picking up any new states that have gone Dem in recent years.
Hillary already pushed the plunger when she said that Obama, unlike her and McCain, was unqualified to act on foreign policy matters. Which has to mean that he’s unqualified to be President. Should Obama get the nom, John McCain will be able to use a clip of Hillary saying this in the fall. How much more do we need to know about how far Hillary will take it? It’s clear that if she can’t win, then she doesn’t care about the party’s prospects.