The Spat

by Hendrik Hertzberg
February 11, 2008

During the four or five weeks leading up to February 5th—“Tsunami Tuesday,” when voters in states with half the nation’s population participate in a not quite national primary—the emotional texture of the Democratic side of the Presidential campaign changed profoundly. For most of Year One of this insanely elongated process, the Democratic Party had been a peaceable kingdom. Its voters were proud of and pleased with the array of choices before them: proud of its diversity, pleased with its unity. A confident woman in middle age; a graceful young African-American of mixed parentage; a handsome Southerner from a white working-class family; and a Mexico City-raised, three-quarters Hispanic governor-diplomat with (for a touch of mayonnaise) a blandly “American” name—these were the Democrats’ leading contenders, supplemented by a more conventional pair of distinguished senators from the East Coast. After years of talk about “looking like America,” here was the real thing. On questions of policy, the views of the candidates were as reassuringly similar as their backgrounds were exhilaratingly different. Such disagreements as they had, none of them fundamental or bitter, were subsumed in their revulsion at the moral and strategic failures of the Bush Administration. As for Democratic voters, it was hard to find one who wouldn’t tell you something like this: “I’m supporting so-and-so in the primary, but I’ll be fine with any of them—just so we get a Democrat in the White House.”
But as Iowa gave way to New Hampshire and then South Carolina, and the contest careered toward its ultimate form of a zero-sum game between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the mood darkened. Anger and depression, the pop-psych books tell us, are two sides of the same coin: depression is anger suppressed, anger is depression liberated. Is it possible to strobe between the two? It must be, because, as the Clinton-Obama race turned nasty, a rapid alternation was noticeable among the sort of obsessive Democrats who follow every twist and turn. This was true of people all across the deep-blue universe: passionate Obama supporters; tentative Obama supporters; Obama-Clinton fence-sitters (including the fans of John Edwards, now bereft); and tentative Clinton supporters. (Passionate Clinton supporters, notwithstanding their candidate’s shrinking but still sizable lead in national polls, seem to be a little rarer.)
The anger was mostly directed at Senator Clinton, her husband, and her campaign, for a series of what have come to be known, redundantly, as “negative attacks.” The most egregious, because so coldly premeditated, was a radio spot that took as its hook a snippet of audio from an Obama interview in which he said, “The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years.” A smooth-voiced announcer then adds:

Really? Aren’t those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we’re in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street? Running up a nine-trillion-dollar debt? Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis? Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?

Uh, no. Those are not the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about. But the spot’s disingenuous questions were plainly intended to deceive the unwary into assuming that Wall Street tax breaks and the like are the very ideas Obama has been advocating. With equal honesty, the spot could have said, “Denying global warming? Torturing prisoners? Appointing right-wing ideologues to the federal courts? Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?” But that might have taxed the credulity of even the unwary.
Actually, Obama was not talking about any particular ideas. He was talking about the conservative movement’s success in marketing its policy ideas and presenting itself as an intellectual powerhouse. He can be faulted for getting the timeline wrong in a way that dismissed the Clinton years—the Republicans’ “party of ideas” claim is at least thirty years old—but his basic point has long been a commonplace among Democrats. It is why liberals have spent the past decade and more trying to build a counterweight to the conservative infrastructure of think tanks and policy journals.
Obama has turned out to have a kind of political magic unseen since the Kennedy brothers of the nineteen-sixties. He has something of Jack’s futuristic, ironic cool, something of Bobby’s earnest, inspiring heat. His endorsement, last week, by President Kennedy’s surviving brother and surviving child closed the circuit. Senator Clinton’s answer to this is “I have more experience.” And it’s true. Her mastery of policy is deep and subtle; her sense of how the White House wields power is probably unequalled. But experience is a problematic argument, especially when voters are hungry for a new beginning.
Anyway, an argument is no match for an aura. So the Clinton campaign evidently concluded that it had no choice but to “go negative,” and Bill Clinton was assigned, or assigned himself, the task. Some of his attempts to sully his wife’s opponent—calling Obama’s consistent opposition to the Iraq war “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen” and dismissing his South Carolina victory as a racial one, like Jesse Jackson’s twenty years ago—have been untruthful or unworthy or both. Whether or not these and similar attacks “worked” (the evidence is mixed), they certainly succeeded in diminishing both the former President and his wife. “The Clintons” used to be a Republican trope, calculated to make one or the other half of the couple look like a puppet or a victim or a co-conspirator; now it is simply descriptive. Bill Clinton’s talents are immense, and so are those of Hillary Clinton. But the events of the past few weeks have suggested that the peculiar dynamics of the Clinton marriage, which distorted the workings of the first Clinton White House in areas ranging from its failed health-care initiative to its inability to quash the Whitewater hoax, would be carried over into a second.
For some Democrats, a final straw has been the Clinton campaign’s sudden interest in changing the rules. In Nevada, where the state’s Democratic Party had provided special caucus sites for casino workers, Clinton allies tried to get them shut down after a union representing many of those workers endorsed Obama. The Democratic National Committee warned the Party’s affiliates in Michigan and Florida that if they moved their primaries ahead of Tsunami Tuesday they would lose their Convention delegates. They did so anyway, and now Clinton—whose name was the only one on the Michigan ballot and who carried Florida, where no one campaigned—is demanding that the two states’ delegates be accredited. Those delegates, added to the bulk of the unelected “superdelegates,” could conceivably put Clinton over the top if Obama arrives at the Convention with a slight edge in delegates chosen by voters—a scenario that would bear an ugly resemblance to Florida, the popular vote, and the Supreme Court, circa 2000.
Last Thursday night’s televised debate between the two remaining Democrats—a civilized and substantive conversation—has eased the tension. But politics ain’t beanbag. One of the arguments made on behalf of the Clintons is that they know how to win. They do what is necessary. They fight hard. They’ve shown they can survive the worst the Republican attack machine can throw at them, next to which the relatively mild roughing-up they’re giving Obama is downright Gandhian. But there are hard-nosed arguments for Obama, too. Nothing would energize the dispirited, disoriented Republicans like running against Hillary Clinton. And a late-entry challenge from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his billions would be far less likely if Obama became the Democratic nominee.
Obama’s Democratic critics worry that his soaring rhetoric of reconciliation is naïve. But, as Mark Schmitt has argued in The American Prospect, Obama’s national-unity pitch should be viewed as a tactic as well as an ideal. It might lengthen his coattails, helping Democratic candidates for the House and the Senate in marginally red districts and states. It would not protect him from attack, of course, but it would enable him to fire back from the high ground. And, as a new President elected with a not quite filibuster-proof Senate, he would be in a better position to peel off the handful of Republican senators he would need to make meaningful legislative progress than someone who started from a defensive crouch. Hillary Clinton would make a competent, knowledgeable, and responsible President. Barack Obama just might make a transformative one.

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Em destaque: A disputa dentro do partido democrata para a definição de seu candidato à presidência

Fonte: The New Yorker
Publicação: 11 de fevereiro 2008
Autor: Hendrik Hertzberg
Link: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/02/11/080211taco_talk_hertzberg