When the machine breaks down

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.

Since March 4, the race for the White House has grown decidedly asymmetrical and, well, odd.
That was the day when, after unequivocal losses in Texas and Ohio, Mike Huckabee withdrew his candidacy, leaving John McCain the undisputed Republican nominee (and packing to fly to the White House next day to receive the equivocal blessing of G.W. Bush, whose approval rating currently stands at a bottom-scraping 28 percent).

It was also the day on which, with wins in the same states, the Clinton campaign, in virtually the moment of its defeat, seized control of the spin, ensuring at least three more months of internecine bloodletting in its doomed struggle for the Democratic nomination (and thus limning the latter with a surreal air).

Consider: Texas was preceded by hoarse calls by rightwing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh for Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary in the Democratic primary—this, with the openly sleazy goal of ‘bloodying up’ Obama. Twelve percent of Republican voters in Texas—the highest percentage to vote in a Democratic primary till then—answered Limbaugh’s call, and of them 119,000 voted for Clinton. Since the latter won Texas by just 101,000 votes in the end (and lost the delegate count), she was effectively kept in the Democratic race by anti-Obama Republicans.

A week later, fully one-quarter of the votes Clinton garnered in Mississippi were again cast by crossover Republicans (though they didn’t save her from being blown away there by Obama).

The news therefore that record numbers of Republicans have been registering to vote in both Pennsylvania’s and North Carolina’s upcoming Democrat primaries may be a bad sign for Obama—something it wouldn’t have been in January and February, when polls consistently showed registered Republicans breaking party ranks to vote for him on idealistic grounds. There can hardly be a better demonstration of how the air of the Democratic contest has been poisoned since then, in large part by the Clinton ‘kitchen sink’ strategy.

And nothing so demonstrates ex-President Clinton’s traditional power in the party as the fact that such Republican dirty tricks (favouring Hillary) have drawn virtually no audible outrage from Democratic Party elders.

That power, however, appears at last to be fading. How else to interpret the Clinton campaign’s loud denunciations of Arizona Governor Bill Richardson for endorsing Obama, two weeks ago?
Ex-Clinton campaign manager and current supporter James Carville declared Richardson a ‘Judas’. Later, instead of apologising, Carville repeated and amplified the epithet with some really crass talk about the need to ‘brand cattle’. And as recently as last Wednesday, Bill Clinton exploded in public, wagging his finger in the faces of those around him and declaring that Richardson had “five times” promised him, President Clinton, that he wouldn’t endorse Obama.

On its face, such expressions of cuckolded rage would appear to be wholly counterproductive. Why keep firmly in the electorate’s mind the fact that Richardson, a two-time appointee to high office by President Clinton himself, was nonetheless now choosing to endorse his wife’s opponent?

Various media talking heads—falling prey themselves perhaps to the ‘Iago myth’, which holds that the Clintons don’t utter so much as a preposition without considerable malice aforethought—speculated that such a public mauling of a one-time supporter could only be intended as a warning to other superdelegates not to defect in their turn.

But that seems a bridge too far. The Clinton campaign’s continuing cursing of Richardson is of a piece with its big-money supporters’ recent threat to financially punish the Democratic Party unless House Speaker Nancy Pelosi withdrew her opinion that superdelegates should endorse the will of the voters. And both seem little more than the knee-jerk threats of a thuggish campaign as, flailing, it goes under.

As one blogger put it: “Bill Richardson…danced across the threshold and proved to everyone that the Clintons have nothing left in their quiver but insults. Once the proof was out that they lacked the power to enforce their will on those who broke with them, the dam broke, and a flood of endorsements have come to Obama.” Although, hardly a flood.

(For her part, the threatened Pelosi mildly repeated her view of the superdelegates’ role. No doubt she was fortified by the 750,000-strong liberal organisation MoveOn.org’s quick announcement that it would make up from members’ contributions whatever punitive deductions the Clinton big money might subject the party to.)

So, in this long hiatus l’entre guerres— Mississippi was nearly four weeks ago, and Pennsylvania is still two weeks away—the slow but steady drift of support to Obama has continued. In the past week, four more superdelegates have declared for Obama (none for Hillary); and on Thursday ex-President Jimmy Carter also (somewhat coyly) signalled his support for Obama.

Last week, too (and those who understand American politics will recognise the importance of this), some 70 Jewish leaders in Pennsylvania signed an open letter expressing support for Obama, opining that he had “a 100 percent voting record on Israel” and praising his recent speech on race.
Lastly, there was the money.

On Thursday, the Obama campaign announced it had raised more than $40 million in March—a monthly take only ever exceeded in a primary campaign by itself; the Obama campaign raised an astounding $55 million in February.

By contrast, the Clinton camp vaguely averred that it had raised “nearly $20 million” in March. Yet, for the first time in the campaign, it has refused to disclose the official figure until required by law to do so, on April 20—just two days before Pennsylvania.
Speculated Politico’s Ben Smith: “There is no plausible explanation for why the campaign would refuse to release their fundraising totals except that the news is dreadful. Releasing her [Hillary’s] tax returns today [Thursday], which they’ve refused to do for months, appears to be a diversionary tactic, something to buy them a few days of avoiding having to ignore too many questions about whether the campaign is in debt and going broke.”

Even more telling than Obama’s March millions is the fact that they came from more than 440,000 contributors, for an average contribution of $96, and included 220,000 first-time contributors. It hasn’t been lost on pundits how, by itself, such broad-based and record-breaking financial support represents a radical shift of power within the Democratic Party, away from the old party bosses (many of whom the Clintons still control) and towards the rank-and-file membership.

That is the real significance of the Obama fundraising phenomenon. That, like Bill Richardson’s defection—and the impotent rage it elicited—it signals that the great Clinton machine may be breaking down at last, destroyed by “a skinny kid from Chicago, with big ears and a funny-sounding name” (Obama’s wry self-description last year).