As the Clinton campaign has done of late with each state they anticipated winning, Hillary Clinton announced in advance that last Tuesday’s Democratic primary was going to be ‘a game-changer.’ It was; but not in the way she meant.
Last Tuesday, West Virginia – capital of Redneck America, a dying rural backwater with no cities and only a quarter of its population under 45 – voted for Hillary by a whopping 41 per cent margin over Obama.
The pro-Obama blogs tried manfully to point out that ‘red’ West Virginia in fact had fewer delegates at stake (28) than all but six of the states contested so far, and that Obama had won four states, plus DC, by greater margins. (In fact, of the states yielding the 21 biggest winning margins so far, Obama has won 18; and the three that have gone for Clinton on that list, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arkansas – and you can probably add Kentucky this coming Tuesday – all share the chinless, banjo-playing, moonshine-imbibing image of the left-behind, po’-white world of author James Dickey’s Deliverance.)
In vain. The US television channels, once again ready and willing to run with the spin offered them by the Clinton campaign – which had prearranged a whirlwind round of talk show appearances for their triumphant candidate on Wednesday – settled down to what they assumed would be many happy days of portentously pointing out that Obama was getting nowhere with white, working-class voters, and what that would mean come November.
Didn’t happen.
In fact, the opposite happened: Clinton’s ‘game-changer’ fell off the front page almost as soon as it landed there.
First, on what was supposed to be Hillary’s night, there occurred in Mississippi the seismic shock of a Democratic challenger unseating the Republican incumbent in a special congressional election in what had been a safe Republican district, one GW Bush had won with 62 per cent of the vote in 2004. (“The earth has moved!” exclaimed NBC’s Tim Russert when he heard the result.) Coming on top of two similar Republican reversals in Illinois and Louisiana in previous weeks, the Mississippi upheaval – the product, it transpired, of African-Americans turning out to vote in unprecedented numbers – shook the Republican party to the core, and raised the spectre of impending disaster for both the Republicans’ presidential and congressional candidates, come November. The mainstream press recalled that in the 2006 Congressional elections, which saw the Democrats take control of both the House and (narrowly) the Senate, not a single Democratic incumbent lost his seat. What looked then, after five shameful years of the Bush administration, like a rising Democratic tide was now threatening to turn out to be a tsunami.
Even more tellingly, in Mississippi as in Louisiana, the Republican strategy had been to tie the Democratic candidates to both Barack Obama and his would-be nemesis, Jeremiah Wright. In the past – remember Willie Horton? – this would surely have been a noose around those candidates’ necks. This time it didn’t work.
(The presidency aside, Obama ought to be in line for an honorary doctorate in Sociology. Which American public figure recognized before he did how fast America has been changing of late?)
The Mississippi earthquake focused the media’s eyes on the general election, and therefore on the two parties’ presumptive nominees – and away from Hillary’s West Virginia blowout. Her victory speech, which campaign manager Terry McAuliffe crowed in advance to MSNBC was going to be “one of the greatest speeches ever!” (in fact, it was little more than the by now standard appeal for contributions by a bankrupt campaign) never got the replays the campaign would otherwise have been able to count on.
Then on Wednesday morning came a second deep tremor. The nationally powerful women’s pro-Choice organization NARAL announced its endorsement of… Obama!
Understandably – since Clinton had long been a staunch supporter of women’s right to choose – Clinton and her supporters were deeply shaken by the NARAL endorsement. “I think it is tremendously disrespectful to Senator Clinton,” said Ellen Malcolm of Emily’s List, the pro-Clinton feminist group. And Clinton backers in Congress wrote bitterly to NARAL: “We are stunned and deeply disappointed… On the heels of Hillary’s extraordinary victory in West Virginia last night, your action is counterproductive to Democratic unity.” The peevish threat in that last sentence was barely coded. Translation: “If Hillary isn’t the nominee, we women are going to stay home or vote for McCain in November!”
Concluded NBC’s Chuck Todd: “By endorsing Obama, the signal that NARAL was sending was that not only is Obama looking like he’ll be the nominee, but also that gender doesn’t matter when it comes to abortion politics. It’s also worth pointing out that not a single NARAL staffer resigned after the endorsement.”
So despite its heraldic West Virginia win, by Wednesday noon the blood of the Clinton campaign was in the water; and the ever-predatory television channels were smelling it.
And then, on Wednesday afternoon, there came John Edwards’ long-awaited endorsement… of Obama!
Was the timing of this ‘game-ender’ too good to be coincidental? The Obama camp denies it, but it’s highly likely it was. When the first wave of the Jeremiah Wright frenzy broke in March, there was New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson onstage the next day with Obama, calling the Illinois senator “a once-in-a-lifetime leader,” and so effectively competing for airtime with the anti-Wright-Obama decibels that a horribly disappointed Clinton team-member James Carville angrily called Richardson a “Judas.”
When the second, bigger wave of Wright-mania occurred (and Obama lost the Pennsylvania primary), there was former DNC chairman and Clinton backer Joe Andrew announcing his endorsement of Obama – and helping him to all but tie Clinton in Andrew’s home state of Indiana.
And now, the day after West Virginia, here was John Edwards, with his white-working-men’s constituency and his treasure chest of 18 pledged delegates – as well as the support of the powerful Steelworkers Union that on Thursday endorsed Obama.
(The Clintons may need to be careful what they hope for. If on May 31 the Clinton-stacked Rules and ByLaws Committee of the DNC rules in their favour and decides to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations in their entirety, after all, who can be sure that Obama by way of reply won’t produce his next super-endorser – Al Gore?)
At any rate, as Mississippi had buried Clinton’s West Virginia victory speech, so Edwards’ endorsement (as Todd pointed out) “ended up burying the interviews Clinton had conducted with the network anchors the day after her West Virginia win. As NBC’s Andrea Mitchell said on TODAY, ‘Just when she was trying to get back on her feet, Hillary Clinton had the rug pulled out from under her.’”
This Tuesday, both candidates should win big, Clinton in Kentucky and Obama in Oregon. But neither result matters. What last week’s events showed was that the Democrats’ real dialogue, in these effectively post-primary days, no longer involves the voters. It’s a monologue, not a dialogue; its language is actions, not words; the Democratic Party now is talking to the Clintons (who have owned it these past 16 years); and what it’s telling them, unanswerably, is: ‘We’re Mr Obama’s party now.’
