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.