By Wayne Brown
(Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the second in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.)
“Hillary Clinton is as good as dead… But the Clinton campaign shows no signs of slowing… So the question now is not just ‘How dead is she?’ but ‘When will she realize it?’” (Slate, Friday, March 28: ‘The Hillary Deathwatch’)
As drama it has almost too much of everything. Two protagonists as unlikely as in Beckett: an African-American and a woman. A huge, enthralled audience—the watching world, no less—only too aware that what’s unfolding on stage has implications that reach far beyond the theatre, conceivably into their own lives. The progressive revelation-through-conflict of the characters.
A prevaricating chorus of super delegates still hanging back mute in the wings, too intimidated perhaps to step forth from the shadows and impose crescendo and then cadence upon the increasingly cacophonous action.
But above all, the battle for the Democratic nomination has proceeded via a seemingly unending series of plot twists and nerve-wracking anti-climaxes as this or that primary or caucus, widely predicted to be decisive, comes to the crunch, passes, and leaves behind it the realisation that nothing’s been decided and that it’s the next primary or caucus that’s going to be decisive, after all.
After Obama ‘decisively’ won Iowa, it was going to be New Hampshire; but Clinton ‘decisively’ won that one. Then it was going to be South Carolina, where Bill Clinton would prove he was still effectively ‘the first black president’; but Obama blew the Clintons away there.
After that, it was indubitably going to be Super Tuesday: Hillary Clinton had long proclaimed February 5 her coronation day. But at the end of that wild ride—every which way at once, across the whole of the United States, from California to Connecticut and from Georgia to Alaska—the glary equivocation of the resulting map left most commentators dazzled.
Clinton had taken ‘the big states’ and the Hispanic southwest.
Obama, the insurgent, had taken pretty much everything else.
Clinton had seized the seat of the Kennedys’ dynastic power, Massachussetts.
Obama had beaten her in crucial Missouri and snatched away ‘her’ Connecticut.
Clinton had taken the mixed white-and-black states.
Obama had taken the ‘white’ states and the ‘black’ states.
Clinton had emerged with bragging rights.
Obama was threatening to take control of the math.
Oddly, the rest of February felt like a calm after the storm, the waves of SuperTuesday subsiding—but turning into a current running all one way as, with deceptive smoothness, Obama quietly put together 12 unanswered victories and the Clinton campaign kept threatening, ‘Ohio, Texas!’
In fact, Obama’s unruffled sweep after SuperTuesday—Nebraska, Louisiana, Virginia…DC, Hawaii, Wisconsin—recalled the game of the 1920s chess genius, the Cuban Capablanca: undemonstrative, fluent, a matter of small gains that are suddenly revealed in their totality to be unanswerable. By the end of February it was over: Obama had taken decisive control of the math.
But the Clinton campaign retained, apparently, exclusive rights to the ‘spin’. Clinton won Ohio, won Texas (but lost the delegate count); and her camp vigorously spun these too-narrow victories into mesmerizing the American media. Clinton, they averred, had ‘seized the momentum’.
Next the Clinton campaign—instructing its audience to ignore Wyoming (a caucus) and Mississippi (a ‘black’ state)—was directing all eyes to Pennsylvania. Now it was ‘all going to come down to’ Pennsylvania.
No one evidently noticed that—historically, culturally—a curious inversion had occurred.
With the race effectively over, its spectral, posthumous unfurling had, so to speak, evolved into a contest between white braggadocio and black science: an odd reversal of centuries’-old archetypes. Obama had the math, but Clinton had the ‘magic’. Shakespeare might as well have made Othello white and Iago black.
This is part—but only part—of the surreal aspect, which the race has acquired lately. What began in Iowa on January 3 as a contest with time-honoured conventions and party rules has since descended into near-anarchy as, facing defeat, the Clintons and their big-money supporters eschewed the writing on the wall and opted instead for ‘total war’. (The phrase is Goebbels’; the policy it describes was adopted by Hitler in August ’44 when the Soviet armies, having crossed the Vistula, began rolling through Poland, converging in earnest on Germany.)
Thus, the Clinton people have challenged in court the Democratic National Committee’s right to disqualify the Florida and Michigan delegations for defying its edicts; cursed Arizona Governor (and long-time Clinton ally) Bill Richardson as a ‘Judas’ for endorsing Obama; warned that they don’t intend to take the votes of even pledged delegates as irrevocably committed; threatened Nancy Pelosi with financially punishing the party unless the House Speaker withdrew her view that superdelegates should honour the will of the voters; and promised a bloody battle all the way to the Convention floor in August—all this, while concentrating their shriveled hopes on mining, with increasing flagrancy, the once- but no longer-inexhaustible deposits of racist sentiment in the white American soul.
So Bill Clinton opined last week Friday that a Clinton-McCain general election contest would be ‘great’, a contest between ‘two people who love this country.’
Nonetheless, according to the pundits, Pennsylvania, with more than three weeks still to go to its primary, is today no longer the ‘decisive’ battle. That allegedly all-or-nothing moment has already been pushed back a further two weeks, to North Carolina. Obama, it’s now widely declared, has to win North Carolina.
Well—to end this in the currency of Obama—here’s the math:
Obama’s lead in North Carolina, which the polls had long shown in the high single digits, but which had shrunk startlingly at the height of the Reverend Wright frenzy to a single point, was on Thursday back up to a healthy14 points. Trailing Clinton by an obliterating 26 points in Pennsylvania by the Sunday of ‘Reverend Wright’, Obama by last Monday had cut her lead there to 10.
And trailing her for the Democratic nomination by 7 points the day before Obama gave his historic speech on race (Gallup’s headline was: ‘Clinton Takes Commanding Lead’), by last Thursday Obama had overtaken Clinton by four points (Gallup again, though an NBC poll released the same day had them tied).
Most recently, a Pew poll conducted last weekend but released on Friday showed Obama leading Clinton nationally by10 points.
But all that is, of course, ‘just’ the math. Obama may take North Carolina handily when the time comes; but this columnist, at least, is already bracing for the Clinton campaign—and their ever-obliging media talking heads—to move the illusory goalposts one more time. Then, no doubt, we shall hear that it’s all going to come down to Guam.
