Thursday - June 05, 2008

Hillary Clinton the last to admit her own death

The View From Here on Hillary.

By Simon Heffer
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 05/06/2008

The joy of jet lag is that one is awake in time to channel-hop between all America’s breakfast news programmes. After an hour or so of this entertainment yesterday morning, it was clear that not just the media, but also the public interviewed over their bacon and maple syrup in diners the length of the East Coast, had decided on one thing: this was a historic morning for America.

Hillary Clinton the last to admit her own death, whilst Barack Obama garners sufficient delegates
Mrs Clinton has achieved her aim of becoming part of history: only not quite in the way she would have wanted

A black man was for the first time confirmed as a nominee for a major party for a presidential election. There seemed to be not just a sense of self-congratulation at this unquestionably inclusive step being made by a country that has not enjoyed the best international press of late, but also relief that a 17-month campaign to choose the top Democrat was over.

However, one person and her friends seemed not to share these sentiments: and that person was Hillary Clinton. When I was last here in New York, the state for which she is a senator, it was Super Tuesday, and even then the game appeared to be up. In the intervening four months, Senator Clinton has had her triumphs, but they have not managed to keep pace with her disasters.

Barack Obama has garnered delegates in sufficient numbers not merely to keep him well ahead of her, but also, at close of play on Tuesday night after the Montana and South Dakota votes ended the primary process, to declare himself the nominated candidate.

Yet Mrs Clinton was still slow to concede that her once-inevitable procession to the White House had been terminally diverted. She claimed she needed more time to think about something that had not merely been pretty obvious to most people for the past four months, but that was now an apparent arithmetical fact.

Her refusal to admit defeat can be, and is, justified in all sorts of ways. She says she is ahead in the popular vote, which ignores the fact that this is not how these things are decided. She says that the delegates might change their minds between now and the convention in Denver at the end of August. Indeed they might, but only if they wished to write their party’s suicide note because of the divisions that would ensue.

She has, of course, delivered a distasteful inference that someone might do to Senator Obama what Sirhan Sirhan did to Bobby Kennedy 40 years ago today, and the less said about that the better. As they say here, she starts to look like a pretty sore loser: or, as we say at home, she just doesn’t get it.

There has not been such a stubborn refusal to die in high politics since the end of Rasputin. Her determination to stay in the race was viewed as courageous by her supporters, who for reasons of taste cannot cite the reason why they think she is right: their belief that a black man, however gifted (and Mr Obama is certainly that) cannot become president of the United States, at least for the moment.

Others have seen it as pig-headed and destructive: and typical of a bullying, arrogant, slimy, dishonest and manipulative political culture that ruled in the White House from 1993 to 2001, when her husband was president.

That is Mrs Clinton’s main problem, and has been her undoing. Her style is that of 1990s machine politics. Her views are those of 1990s “third way” Leftism, with their emphasis on the power of the state and extended welfarism and their ignorance of real economics. Her rhetoric is tailored to appeal to the cohorts of organised blue-collar labour who are her power base, and she speaks stiltedly and rather patronisingly in their tongue.

For all these reasons she is completely out of date. She has an appeal only to those who wish to defend a position that a sane army would have abandoned long ago. She is an irrelevance to those who see that America has changed, the world has changed, and a new leader needs to make an accommodation with those realities. Does she remind you of anyone?

It has been difficult, watching Mrs Clinton’s final desperate moments as a would-be nominee, not to draw parallels with our own Prime Minister. She is being rumbled by her own party, and by the wider American public, as someone who can’t do the business. Mr Obama has been gentlemanly in the extreme in his lavish public tributes to her, but his followers regard her as self-serving and destructive.

Mrs Clinton’s period of reflection yesterday was the cover for her attempt to engineer Mr Obama into offering her a place as his running mate: her sense of entitlement will be the last part of her to die. It has been hard to find an Obama supporter, however wedded to party unity, who wants him even to countenance such a thing.

The Obama camp has snidely whispered throughout this process about “Bill’s unconstitutional third term”. Having beaten his wife to the nomination, do they really want to bring her, him and the baggage of Clintonism back into the White House for perhaps eight years of raining on his parade?

As is usual with the Clintons, subtle threats seep from “sources close” about what would happen if Mrs Clinton doesn’t get her consolation prize. They hint that her fundraisers, some of the most opulent of whom she met in New York on Tuesday night, might not bankroll Mr Obama. He, however, has had far more success at raising money than she has, and will not end the campaign, as she is ending it, $11 million in debt.

More worrying is the chorus from some of her supporters, notably white working-class women, that they will adamantly sit at home, or possibly even vote for John McCain, if she is not on the ticket. That is the judgment Mr Obama now has to make, and there is a united view outside Mrs Clinton’s camp that anyone but her will do.

To be fair to Mrs Clinton - and it requires a superhuman effort, given the dirty and charmless way she has run her campaign - she is more experienced than Mr Obama. It is true when she says he is untested in ways that she, as someone who has hacked around high politics for the past 15 years, is not. But to be fair to Mr Obama, he has not merely won a beauty contest by dint of being more beautiful.

He has won it by failing to promise anything in particular, notably the return to the 1990s that his opponent has. It may be in the battle now against Senator McCain that he will be found wanting, and the vacuity of his charismatic world view will be exposed: but he has earned the right to be in that battle, just as surely as Mrs Clinton has forfeited hers.

The only surprise now - short of Mr Obama asking her to be his running mate - will be a genuine act of loyalty by the Clintonistas towards him when they realise that Mrs Clinton will not be heading for the vice-presidency. As, again, we have seen in our own politics, it is always easier to fight one’s own side than one’s notional enemies, so this may not happen.

The unexpected can, of course, happen between now and November 4. Yet with the primaries over, Mrs Clinton has achieved her aim of becoming part of
history: only not quite in the way she would have wanted.

http://tinyurl.com/6564xf

Posted by Drew458     on 06/05/2008 at 10:46 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Hildabeast • Politics •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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