Hillary’s rationale (or…what she wants to say but can’t)

Many theories have been put forward to explain why Hillary Clinton doggedly remains in the Democratic contest in the face of an insurmountable delegate deficit. Though the math stands starkly against her, many think the Clintons as an entity are simply sore losers who don’t know how to accept defeat after expecting a cakewalk to the nomination; others think Clinton is bent on having her way or the highway, hoping to damage Obama in ’08 so that she can reemerge as the Democratic savior in 2012; still others believe she is hell-bent on taking the nomination in a Mondale-esque Convention coup. But the reality may be less sinister and more well-intentioned than Clinton is given credit for. And it most likely equally misguided.

Let us assume for a minute that behind the duplicitous and overly cheesy campaign she has run, Clinton still retains within her a functional and even decent or warm heart. She’s not simply trying to cut Obama down and she’s not trying to usurp the popular will of voters just to satisfy her own Lady Macbeth-like ambitions. She truly believes not only that she would make a significantly better President than Obama, but perhaps more importantly that she would be a significantly stronger general election candidate than him. Put bluntly, she thinks he would lose to McCain and she would not.

Her reasons for thinking this way really don’t have anything to do with her “35 years of experience,” they don’t have to do with her foreign policy “credentials” and they don’t have anything to do with Billy the kid at her side. She thinks Obama would lose because he’s black. Clinton, in this scenario, is not interested in who leads in pledged delegates or even overall popular votes. She’s interested in exit polls. It doesn’t matter how much she wins Pennsylvania by, but rather what the FoxNews exit poll says about how white voters broke. If Obama can’t win the white voters in the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, then surely he won’t be able to nab them away from McCain. Superdelegates must realize that since March 4th and the ensuing Rev. Wright controversy, Obama has been irreparably damaged and will never be able to carry the key constituency for the fall: blue-collar whites.

Of course she can’t say this in TV interviews. But it makes a fair amount of sense if you put yourself in her shoes. It’s not fair to Obama, but this is the way it is. She’ll be able to save the party from inevitable defeat and enact Universal health care and end the war in Iraq and throw magic pixie dust all over the earth and open a “special” room in the White House exclusively for lesbians over the age of 50. I think this explanation of her mindset perhaps overstates the case but is quite plausible, even probable. But it’s also equally misguided and betrays the clumsy logic that has guided her campaign thus far and dumbfounded her chances at the nomination. Here’s why:

1) A vote for Hillary Clinton isn’t a vote against Obama. At stark as the racial divides have been in some state votes so far, it’s a far stretch to say that pro-Clinton whites were hesitant about Obama because he was black. There might be a subset of Clinton’s voters that feel this way, but to assume that Clinton-voting whites will automatically gravitate to another white candidate in the fall is a little silly. The same argument can be used against the “big state-wins” theory that her campaign has played: sure, she beat Obama in Ohio; but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be McCain in the same state.

2) The Democratic contest at this point is essentially a personality contest. The policy differences between Clinton and Obama are small in number and substance. There is much to be said for their respective abilities to enact the changes in policy that they both support, but health coverage mandates and diplomatic preconditions notwithstanding, the differences in their positions on the issues voters care about aren’t really much to harp on. Voters are guided by vague arguments of change against experience, ability to unite against ability to get things done, ability to inspire against ability to convincingly wear pantsuits. When the general election comes around and voters are confronted instead with choices such as ending or prolonging the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq war, their rationales for choosing a candidate will be significantly altered.

3) None of this changes the original argument against Clinton’s chances: she cannot win unless she “overturns the will of the voters.” Fine, superdelegates were invented for expressly this purpose. Fine, she might think she would have a better chance of winning. Fine, her camp can contrive argument after argument, each more convoluted than the next, about how the math actually works in her favor. But the fact still remains that a win by her would be painted as an elitist overturning of the choices of the American people. The party would be torn into chaos, frogs would fall from the sky, fire and brimstone would flare uncontrollably of Wolf Blitzer’s butthole and somehow the internet would cease to exist. Knowing this, superdelegates will never turn to her, however “credible” the case for her candidacy may be.

Role reversal

The Obama-Clinton race in Pennsylvania has taken an odd turn today as Senator Bob Casey Jr. threw his weight behind Barack Obama after previously vowing to remain neutral in the race (he apparently made a decision to enter the fray at the bequest of his daughters who are fervent Obama supporters). The two most high-profile Democratic endorsements in the state are Sen. Casey and current PA Governor Ed Rendell who is backing Hillary Clinton. That both of these influential public figures have stamped their approval on one of the two remaining candidates is not a shock; but the side that each has come down on is quite surprising—from a purely demographic standpoint.

Rendell and Casey ran against each other in the primary race of the Democratic Gubernatorial nomination in 2002. Casey was initially seen as the more electable candidate owing to his more moderate views and the familiarity of his name (his father was the 44th Governor of Pennsylvania); the state establishment accordingly threw their support behind him. Casey’s strong hold were in the rural swaths of Pennsylvania: he scored well among blue-collar workers and those members of the Democratic party with more socially moderate views. Casey himself was a Catholic who opposed abortion rights and was more to the right on gun control issues than most of the party.

Rendell on the other hand was an upstart former Mayor of Philadelphia. His strongholds were in urban areas and he only ended up carrying 10 out of 67 counties in the eventual primary vote. He polled significantly better among the African-American population of Pennsylvania and held an upper hand with more affluent and educated liberals; he was also able to attract a significant portion of disenchanted Republicans who were subsequently dubbed “Rendellicans.”

Does this sound familiar at all? Two voting coaltions—one of white working-class voters in rural areas with more conservative views and one of African-Americans, wealthier Democrats and crossover Republicans in generally urban and suburban areas? Taking away the gender and youth disparities between Clinton and Obama voters and you’ve pretty much got the same thing. So it’s curious that Rendell has come down for Clinton and Casey for Obama. In many ways, each campaign sees their respective big-name endorsers as instruments for chipping away at their opponents base. But seeing as the crucial voting bloc this election (I hesitate to use the word “swing vote”) has been white, blue-collar workers, the advantage has to go to Obama. Remember, Clinton has never focused truly hard at securing part of Obama’s base—hey pyrrhic victories have come because she was able to safeguard her own.

Where do white people get off accusing black people of racism?

The most frustrating aspect of the “race debate” that has spawned from Obama’s Pastor Wright controversy has been the tendency of white—usually conservative—commentators to decry the comments of Pastor Wright and other African-Americans as racist. The logic goes something like this: we should judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin; grouping or stereotyping a person or collective of people based on the color of their skin falls into the category of passing a judgement based on race, not on character; therefore, uttering a line like “typical white person” (as Barack Obama recently did) is racist; interchanging terms proves the point—if a white person said something about a “typical black person,” it would be racist so the opposite must be true as well!

Brilliant. If one more person decries the racial double standard that works against white people in a public discourse, I will commit a hate crime against them. Ignoring the fact that the "typical white person" gaffe was a part of a larger and more sophisticated point Senator Obama was attempting to make, let's state what should be blatantly obvious: you can’t just flip-flip ethnicities and then call a statement’s corollary racist. Things don’t work that way. Of course, the statement would still be “racist” in the sense that it is a characterization based on an individual’s race. But the substantive implications, the contextualized reference, of the proclamation would be excised; the statement would be, in effect, rendered functionally moot. True racism—one might hesitate to say meaningful racism—inextricably binds itself to larger societal implications. It is predicated upon a systemic power structure that legitimizes one ethnic group at the expense of another. The idea is that every time a white person says something “racist” about a black person, for example, it is reinforcing stereotypes and social forces that work against black individuals as a whole. Thus, society is justified in decrying “racist” statements, intentional or unintentional, overt or covert, that are issued from white to black people. However, if a black person were to make an innocuous reference to white people (say, referring to an individual as a “typical white person”), they are not somehow perpetuating a broader public antagonism towards Caucasians. No white person is going to be looked at differently when applying for a job or a bank loan or in front of a judge in court because of the accumulated effects of black-on-white “racist” comments that are made day in and day out. So to call a black person racist by the same standards that a white person would be called racist is just stupid. It promotes a game of racial tattle-tale, diverting attention from larger and more important issues that need to be addressed.

To win Pennsylvania...

Following a harsher-than-expected loss in Ohio, Barack Obama needs to retool his campaign strategy if he hopes to score a victory in the demographically-unfavorable territory of Pennsylvania. The state has one of the oldest populations in the nation, a small African-American community and the kind of lower-income blue-collar workers that have tended towards Hillary Clinton in the voting booth this Democratic election. Obama began to make inroads with these types of voters (Hillary Clinton’s “coalition”) in the Potomac primaries and in Wisconsin the following week, but the talking-head consensus seems to be that she reclaimed her base according to March 4th exit polls. Below is a systematic gameplan that Barack Obama should use to bolster his chances of success in Pennsylvania:

1) Play up “Americanism.” Blue collar reluctance to Obama can partially be attributed to a lack of familiarity. Obama has been on the national scene for a relatively scarce amount of time—his chief competitor was wife to the President for 8 years—and he has run an insurgent campaign, identifying himself as an outsider. As such, voters who won’t prioritize giving both the candidates a thorough look-through will tend to gravitate to one who has a proven-track record of success, the one that comes across as a safe bet. Coupled with the unfounded rumors of Obama’s Muslim ties, this has tended to give voters a level of insecurity about him, even if they like what he is saying. The way to overcome both of these obstacles is to make himself the “American” candidate. It will give a sense to voters that he is one of them and will effectively counteract currents of spin that paint him as supreme “other.” He should inject more of his 2004 Democratic Convention speech into his stump speeches—talk about his father form Kenya, his mother from Kansas, how he owes his unlikely success to America. Obama’s “story” trumps Clinton’s life story and will work to assuage reservations voters might have towards voting for an outsider.

2) Emphasize underdog role. Every time Obama has had Clinton on the ropes, he has built up the narrative that a win for him should be a given. In Ohio and New Hampshire, he cut into enormous leads in a relatively short time span and was able to exceed initial expectations for how he would perform in certain demographics. But his pre-vote surge in state polls and the consequent media coverage that paints Clinton as a goner tends to obscure the unlikely chances of his success in the first place. He should continually mention that the most likely scenario in the Pennsylvania race is a Clinton win. He should force voters to buy into the notion that a vote for him is a vote against conventional wisdom. Clinton does best when she is in a position to garner sympathy and has masterfully exploited that to her advantage in New Hampshire and Ohio. Obama should do as much as he can to reverse that narrative.

3) Revisit the Iowa model. He should go back to exactly what worked in Iowa—invest significant in the state. Don’t hold the megawatt rallies in big cities initially. Start off by touring Appalachia, blue-collar havens and Republican strong holds. Hold intimate gatherings and town halls. Do everything he can to ensure voters trust him more than Clinton. He’s veered off his Iowa message as he has started pivoting towards a general election, but is he reshapes the Pennsylvania race as a repeat of his first battle for the Democratic nomination, he is surely on more solid ground.

4) Counteract Clinton’s institutional support. Clinton has the endorsement of much of Pennsylvania’s establishment including Governor Ed Rendell. She will appear with known party leaders at her campaign stops and will use their infrastructures to her advantage. Obama has fewer of these connections in the state but has one supporter in particular that could help to counterbalance Clinton’s establishment backing: Patrick Murphy. Murphy is a newly-elected congressman from Pennsylvania and an early Obama backer. He is, more importantly, the only Iraq War veteran in Congress. He should be Obama’s right hand man at campaign stops, much as Ted Kennedy was in the run up to February 5th states. He will lend credence to Obama’s claim of superior judgement on Iraq and foreign policy solely by virtue of the fact that he has witnessed firsthand the realities of American occupation.

Even if he follows this game plan, Obama’s chances in Pennsylvania do not look good. However, if he can keep the race within 4 or 5 points, I think he can very well make the claim that the race was a virtual tie for all intents an purposes. Winning for him in one of these “Clinton strongholds” is very similar to the experience argument in this race: Obama doesn’t need to prove he has more experience than Clinton, he just needs to show he has enough. Similarly, he doesn’t have to beat Clinton in states like Pennsylvania, he just needs to do well enough among her base to show that he can garner enough of that support to add to his coalition and carry those states in the fall.