By Wayne Brown
It’s what the media often does: hype a story out of all proportion; fall to believing its own hype; and then be deeply dismayed to discover its audience has moved on, leaving it enisled in its own vaporous excitement.
So, after the latest media frenzy over the Reverend Wright – including four hour-long ‘specials’ on Wright and Obama on CNN and MSNBC in the days immediately prior to Tuesday’s primaries – both cable networks had Tuesday’s narrative ready to go. Based on the belief that (their own) wall-to-wall coverage of the Reverend had finally destroyed Obama, this was that Hillary was not only going to romp home in Indiana but was coming from behind in North Carolina with a terrific surge to pip Obama on the post. (The Clinton campaign evidently believed the latter, too: last weekend they abruptly re-scheduled Hillary to appear in the Tar Heel state and poured money they didn’t have – that $450,000 which Hillary lent her campaign the day before North Carolina? – into 11th hour television ads there.)
On Tuesday, both channels filled the waiting hours with admiring accounts of how Bill ‘Bubba’ Clinton had worked more than 50 small towns in North Carolina; that, they averred, was how he had ‘won Texas for Hillary.’ Straddling the noon hour, CNN contrived to keep Hillary onscreen uninterruptedly for 40 minutes (this, on a Primaries’ day). It was impossible to miss the gleam of satisfaction in Chris Matthews’ eyes as, around 4 pm, MSNBC dropped its first portentous hint of what it was sure was coming. Exit polls were showing, Matthews said, that “fully half of the voters in Indiana and North Carolina say the Reverend Wright issue was important to them.”
Obama supporters settled in for a long night.
Six hours later, Matthews looked utterly deflated. How was it, he disbelievingly asked a black pastor, that half the voters said Reverend Wright was important to them, yet the results showed no Reverend Wright effect whatever?
Well, the pastor explained patiently to Matthews, “it’s clear that while the Reverend Wright affair may have been important to these voters, it wasn’t decisive.” Easiest $500 that gentleman of the cloth ever made. ($500: MSNBC’s going rate for brief appearances by non-regulars.)
The intervening hours had announced, of course, an Obama blowout in North Carolina, while in Indiana Hillary’s early lead was vanishing. She won by less than one per cent –50.4 to 49.6 was the adjusted figure – a fraction of the seven per cent of ‘Rush Limbaugh Republicans’ who, by ABC’s maths, voted for Clinton in a successful effort to stop Obama.
And suddenly the US media reversed themselves! All together, like a school of minnows, they went from explaining how Wright had doomed Obama to declaring Obama the Democratic nominee!
NBC’s Tim Russert was first out of the blocks. “We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be,” he told MSNBC around midnight.
Next morning, the herd came crashing along on his heels. Bob Schieffer on CBS: “Basically this race is over.” George Stephanopoulos on ABC: “This nomination fight is over.” “Toast!” blared The New York Post over a cover photo of Hillary. “It’s His Party!” preened The Daily News (with a wicked pun on “Party”).
Time magazine puffed along in their wake, with a fine cover photo of Obama and the legend: “And the Winner is…”
And The Huffington Post’s political editor, Thomas Edsall, happily donated this purple prose: “Hillary Clinton, who for seven weeks has crawled, kicked and bitten her way back into contention, suffered a blow on Tuesday… In the universe of political clichés, she is on life support, her oxygen choked off, her knees buckling, unable to stanch the bleeding, down for an eight count, on the ropes, praying for the bell to ring, desperate to get her wind back. In North Carolina, she suffered a crushing, 15-point-plus defeat at the hands of Barack Obama…”
By Wednesday afternoon, the AP was reporting: “Democrats quietly send word to Clinton it’s over.”
It took the herd about a day to realize that Hillary wasn’t listening. In fact, she had to shock them to attention with the assertion, to USA Today, that an exit poll had “found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
Whereupon the whole dynamic of this 2008 presidential election fell into place with a click.
In deciding to run, Obama (as this column has pointed out) was manifestly placing a bet: that most white Americans – not all, but most – had progressed beyond the white racist and ignorant tribe of Bubbas the world knew in the 20th century.
But here now was Hillary, stripped down in defeat to her essential worldview, defiantly countering that most white Americans are still racist and ignorant and are therefore “supporting me”!
Ah, Hillary.
The bloggers jumped all over her. They pointed out (by this columnist’s count) no less than 15 instances in the past 5 months of the Clintons or their campaign staff or high-ranking supporters playing the race card: Billy Shaheen with his “Obama the ex-drug dealer” slur, Bill Clinton with his wistful musings about how a McCain-Clinton election would be “a contest between two Americans who love their country,” and so on. The Huffington Post’s Mike Barnicle warned readers that “the Clintons are about to paste a bumper sticker on the collapsing vehicle of her campaign. It reads: VOTE WHITE.”
One blogger pointed out that Hillary had waited till after the last primary in a state with a substantial black population to turn her race card face up on the table. Another argued that the Clintons, out of options – for they were going under, going down, at last – had made the desperate calculation that they could reconstruct the Democratic Party, dump its African-American support–that had twice won the White House for Bill Clinton – and replace it with a Latino base.
At present, the herd is confused. Most commentators still anticipate a tidy exit by Hillary – after West Virginia, or after Kentucky/Oregon on the 20th, or else after the Ways and Means Committee meets on May 31st, or after the last primaries on June 6th… And several have begun urging the party’s Superdelegates to act, endorse Obama, and put Hillary out of her misery before she destroys the party’s chances in November.
But this columnist is not so sanguine.
The Clintons have anticipated Hillary’s presidency for nine years – ever since Monica Lewinsky. They had to have known by mid-February, as Obama racked up 12 straight victories, that there was no longer any licit route to the White House for them. But they pressed on, in a mood this column early termed “Après moi, le déluge”; and nothing that has happened since suggests that, in defeat, they’ll hesitate for a moment before taking Obama and the Democratic Party down with them.
On Tuesday, West Virginia, a redneck state – Deliverance country – goes to the polls, to vote overwhelmingly for the white lady.
And the Clintons’ racist pitch will go right on.
