(Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the twelfth in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election).
By Wayne Brown
Nothing so typified her campaign as the manner in which she was finally forced to quit it.
On the night of Tuesday June 3, the night Barack Obama finally clinched the Democratic nomination—Hillary Clinton gave an astonishing performance.
Introduced to her wildly cheering supporters by campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe as ‘the next president of the United States’—Huh?—Clinton proceeded surrealistically to give what was a victory or a campaign speech. One in which she “sought to delegitimize” Obama’s historic victory (as Daily Kos blogger TorqueDeville puts it) with a triumphal address in which she declined even to acknowledge that Obama had crossed the delegate finish line. Instead, she claimed (dishonestly) that she had carried the popular vote, “with more votes than any primary candidate in history,” and demanded rhetorically, “Who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as commander-in-chief and lead our country to better tomorrows?”
TorqueDeville pointed out that this was nothing less than an exercise in “sophistry [designed] to rally her army” in the face of a defeat that, astoundingly, she seemed determined not to accept.
The New York Times’ authoritative columnist Frank Rich amplified: “Remarkably, neither Mrs Clinton nor Mr McCain’—who, rather had tried to gatecrash the Demo-crats’ big moment with a “major” address of his own—“had the grace to offer a salute to Mr. Obama’s epochal political breakthrough, which reverberated so powerfully across the country and throughout the world. By being so small and ungenerous, they made him look taller.’
‘Yet,’ observed Rich, ‘even as the two establishment candidates huffed and puffed to assert their authority, they seemed terrified by Mr Obama’s insurgency. Mrs Clinton held her non-concession speech in a Manhattan bunker, banishing cellphone reception and television monitors carrying the news of Mr Obama’s clinching of the nomination.
Mr McCain, labouring under the misapprehension that he was wittily skewering his opponent, compulsively invoked the Obama-patented mantra of ‘change’ 33 times. Mr McCain only reminded voters that he, like Mrs Clinton, thinks that change is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. He has no idea what it means.’
Impishly dissing the faux-gravitas of the two ‘Washing-ton’ candidates, Rich also reported that—on what, to repeat, was Obama’s night—Hillary and McCain each employed the first-person pronoun more than 60 times (by comparison with the night’s winner’s 30).
A female African-American blogger was more upset. “…as a black woman,’ she wrote, ‘I am completely disgusted by Hillary Clinton’s lack of class last night. And I feel betrayed by the so-called ‘feminist’ movement, which, during this campaign, has revealed itself to be a movement only concerned with the interests of white women. It is narcissistic and self-involved. Here was the proudest moment that black people have had in this country, and Hillary could not let us have it. It still had to be about her.”
The consensus was that Hillary was planning to “use” her 18 million supporters to force herself onto Obama’s ticket as his running mate—an idea she had vulgarly thrown out herself in a conference call with reporters a couple days earlier. It was at least a smile-provoking gambit from a campaign that, six weeks earlier—when Clinton had already effectively lost—had insultingly floated the suggestion that Obama might make a good running mate for Clinton—a clear expression of the covertly racist taunts and tosses to which, after Iowa, the Clintons had increasingly resorted.
(When Bill Clinton once referred publicly to Mr. Obama as a ‘kid,’ Representative James E. Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, recalled a fellow black congressman saying, “I don’t know why he didn’t just call him ‘boy’ and get it over with.’ Clinton said Clyburn, “was using code words that most of us in the South can recognize when we hear that kind of stuff.”)
In the new America, however, with its legions of what’s-the-big-deal-about-race young people, such appeals to old-time American racism were, if anything, counter-productive. This is how Clinton biographer Carl Bernstein summed up her campaign: “Faced with unanticipated adversity, Hillary and Bill Clinton took the low road too often, and voters noticed. So did the party leadership and superdelegates, who abandoned her and the idea of a Clinton Restoration. Barack Obama’s candidacy was the Clintons’ worst nightmare. They… were utterly confounded.”
A candidate’s running mate has always been chosen at the pleasure of the nominee, and there were those who thought the Hillary-for-Veep brouhaha was itself at least subconsciously racist. Never in American political history had the camp and supporters of a defeated candidate campaigned publicly to try to force a presidential nominee to take their candidate onto his ticket. No less a figure than Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, perhaps Hillary’s staunchest supporter, was led to protest: “You don’t bargain with the nominee.” TorqueDeville, no doubt accurately, called such a campaign “self-destructive”.
It emerged that in the wake of her non-concession speech, it was Clinton’s closest advisors, who persuaded her supporters in Congress, to get on the phone to her and force her to concede. Charles Rangel, the 77-year-old, African-American dean of New York’s congressional delegation—and Clinton’s mentor and enabler of her original election to the Senate—led the charge. Not just on the phone to Clinton, but publicly, he insisted that Clinton had now to endorse Obama. In conference calls, seven of Hillary’s closest supporters in the Senate, and 23 in the House, pressed the same course on her. The meaning of their combined imprecations was clear: Concede now, or forget any future you’re hoping to have in the Senate. L. Douglas Wilder, the prestigious African-American mayor of Richmond and former governor of Virginia, explicitly warned that, by waiting so long, Hillary was “threaten[ing] her future stature within the Democratic Party”.
Like that—‘Kicking and Screaming,’ as the New York Post headlined it, vindictively but not inaccurately—Hillary Clinton finally submitted to being pulled off the stage of this year’s presidential elections.
Her belated endorsement of Obama last week Saturday, however, was fulsome enough; and the television talking heads—who had clearly been more disturbed by her non-concession than they felt free to express—fell in relief to praising it effusively, and moved on.
Their fellow-commentators in the press preoccupied themselves with identifying what the New York Times Maureen Dowd termed the “fatal missteps” by which the Inevitable Nominee had wandered into the cul-de-sac of defeat.
But it was Clinton supporter, ex-Senator Bob Kerrey—who had early disgraced himself with talk about Barrack ‘Hussein’ Obama having attended a ‘secular Madrassa’—who spoke what was surely the last word on that subject. “The hard truth,” Kerrey told the New York Times last Sunday, “is that from the moment Mr Obama announced his candidacy…Mrs. Clinton was facing a candidate with greater skills than any candidate and her husband had ever faced in his life.”
Last week the Hillary-for-Veep drumbeat was continuing—though more, one suspects, on her supporters’ part than hers.
The NYT reported that the defeated Clinton camp was busily updating its list of ‘traitors and enemies’, but that seemed either funny-contemptible or merely sad.
The same paper also reported that Hillary was hoping Obama would help her pay off her scandalous campaign debt: $30 million.
Meanwhile, the splenetic Bill Clinton was happily resuming his hugely profitable speaking engagements. Cost of a front-row ticket: $500.
