Heading for the tunnel

By Wayne Brown

Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Canada. He will be writing a series on the US election for Sunday Stabroek.

The Obama and Clinton camps may be increasingly riven by bad blood, but beyond them there’s a growing consensus: that, in what should be the Democrats’ year, the party is heading for a train wreck at its August Convention. As Kansas professor, Joe Aistrup put it last week: “The potential for one side to feel that the other has stolen the nomination is really strong right now. The result of that in November is that it turns a pretty strong probability of a Democratic victory into a situation where John McCain is very likely to win.”

Aistrup’s view is shared by many commentators and Democratic Party elders these days. And it’s supported by the changing tone of the bloggers – and, more so, the comments they’ve been attracting. Since early January, this columnist has watched the blogosphere’s campaign tone evolve from one of high-spirited rivalry between the two Democrats’ camps to, often now, mere back-and-forth vituperation, as positions on both sides have hardened.

(One Clinton supporter’s putdown of Obama after Ohio was memorably succinct: “Obama, you lost. Go cry me a river.” But even that quip may – or may not – have been a racial sneer, depending on whether the writer was invoking Ella Fitzgerald’s famous sixties blues song, or the quite different track with the same title released in 2001 by Justin Timberlake.)

But wit is in short supply in the blogs’ threads these days. Cynicism, bitterness, and even fury are what one oftener hears there.

Last week, Mississippi showed the same stark march towards polarization. In January, exit polls had sketched a near-lovefest: about three-quarters of the supporters of either candidate, they disclosed, would be ‘satisfied’ if the other candidate were the eventual nominee. But those numbers have dropped alarmingly. After Mississippi (where, as he has so often done, in ‘black’ states and ‘white’ states alike, Obama blew Clinton away, winning by 24 points), only 60 per cent of Obama supporters still said they would be “satisfied” were Clinton to be the nominee. And a thunderous 63 per cent of Clinton voters (promptly dubbed by commentators ‘the Sisterhood’) said they would be “dissatisfied” with an Obama candidacy. This growing rancour has been helping McCain. National polls show a steady rise in his ‘favourability’ rating, accompanied by a steady drop in both Obama and Clinton’s as their war continues. A mere month ago, their favourability ratings beat McCain’s by 15 and 8 points respectively. Now McCain’s beats them each by about 10 points.

At root, this demoralizing turn of affairs derives from the Clinton camp waking up one morning in late February to discover that Obama’s guerrilla campaign strategy – picking off the ‘rural villages’ (small and medium-sized states) one by one, until the establishment suddenly finds itself surrounded and isolated in a few big cities – has worked brilliantly, and that they can no longer overtake him in pledged delegates. At which point, the outraged Clintons eschewed the propriety of concession and opted instead for total war.

This involved:

Abruptly hurling the kitchen sink at Obama, including ethnic ‘warnings’ (circulating a photo of Obama in Muslim garb in Kenya); subliminally racist ads (cf Harvard’s Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson’s analysis of Hillary’s ‘3 a.m. telephone’ ad in the NYT last Sunday); and even overtly racist remarks, like Geraldine Ferraro’s. (The one-time vice-presidential candidate opined ridiculously last week that Obama wouldn’t have got where he was if he hadn’t been black. One talk show wit’s riposte: ‘If Obama had been white he’d have been John F Kennedy.’) It also included Clinton deriding Obama’s commander-in-chief qualities in comparison to McCain’s.

(As Obama endorser, former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, pointed out, it’s unheard of for a candidate to affirm that the other party’s candidate would be superior to his or her own party’s alternative nominee.) Warning that, technically, pledged delegates may still be wooed to change their allegiances Inventing a new category of delegates, the ‘caucus delegates’ – this, in preparation for arguing that these should be removed from the Obama column as not being ‘truly’ representative Clamouring for the banned Florida and Michigan delegates to be counted, or permitted a revote, after all Insisting that superdelegates take an expansive view of their role and cast their votes for the candidate who, in their view, would have the best chance of defeating McCain – even if this involves them in overturning the will of the voters (and thus cueing a rerun of Chicago ’68).

Such gambits threaten more than enough bad blood to induce the losing candidate’s supporters to stay home in November. Yet no one in the party seems to be in a position to switch the tracks before the train runs into the tunnel and the wall it ends in.

On Thursday, eg, the head of Florida’s Democratic Party reported that her proposed vote-by-mail redo was unlikely to happen: for different reasons, all nine Democratic House members from Florida oppose it. If she can’t get the invalid results retroactively ratified, Clinton wants a full, state-run primary. Obama expressed concerns about how a vote-by-mail redo would be run, but said mildly he would abide “by whatever rules the DNC lays out.” The Florida party’s head admits the DNC won’t sanction any solution not endorsed by both candidates. And the party’s national chairman, Howard Dean, concurs. “When you change the rules in the middle of the game, which is what’s being proposed here, you’ve got to do it in a way that both campaigns agree is fair,” Dean said.

Translation: Zugszwang

Yet the political imperative of finding a way to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations is starkly clear. Rebuff them and they’ll probably stay home in November; and that will be that. The best hope of ending the internecine bloodletting – and for the moment it’s a distant one – lies with those superdelegates who’re either governors or Congress(wo)men: a faction that since Iowa has endorsed Obama over Clinton, 53 to 12. (Significantly, that trend survived Clinton’s Ohio and Texas victories; nine more superdelegates have since endorsed Obama to Clinton’s one.)

Their choice upholds due process – Obama’s unassailable 155-pledged delegates’ lead – in the face of the procedural anarchy into which, in desperation, the Clintons have been trying to drag the race. It also reflects the polls that have uniformly shown Obama, unlike Clinton, beating McCain in head-to-head matchups. Said Senator Jay Rockefeller last week: “All along Obama has been the one person McCain does not want to run against, and that is still true.” The question is whether it may not already be too late.