May 9, 2008--End the Madness

Things are going from bad to worse.

Many thought that Hillary Clinton hit unredeemable rock bottom on Tuesday when she got trounced in North Carolina and barely squeaked out a victory in Indiana. Neither was supposed to happen. She appeared to have momentum or traction, take your media-hype pick of descriptors; and it was hinted that she’d win by double digits in Indiana and might even pull an upset in NC.

When that didn’t occur, Tim Russett and Time Magazine declared the contest over. All that remained was for Hillary to implement her exit strategy. Others in her camp were reported to be doing just that—negotiating for tell-all book deals while publishers would still return their phone calls.

Would she take the gracious high road and release her delegates to vote for Obama or subtly work to bring Obama down in the general election so that McCain would win and she could stage her ultimate comeback in four years? Or was she angling for the vice presidency? Perhaps what she was really seeking was some face-saving series of events—big wins in West Virginia and Kentucky and some fig leaf solution to the Michigan and Florida messes, a deal that would allow her to claim that she fought to have “every vote count, every voice heard.”

Then yesterday she revealed her real intentions when she had her Reverend Wright moment. But this time she was her own Reverend Wright.

Commenting about an Associate Press report that Barack Obama was still having trouble attracting working-class voters, rather than letting that speak for itself, considering that the contest for the nomination is essentially over, she couldn’t resist agreeing. But rather than doing so in an objectively neutral manner she went out of her way to underline the racial and not the class implications, insinuating—and there is no other way to put it—that working people, “hard-working white Americans” are not voting for Obama. That hard working white people, she said “white” twice in two sentences to be sure no one missed her point, not only form her base but will not vote for Obama.

Parsing this it is obvious that she was making a number of syllogistically related points—

• Barack Obama is just a black candidate since he cannot attract white votes;

• “Hard-working Americans” is code for “white Americans”;

• This means that Black Americans, Obama’s base, are not hard working.

It would be easy to say more, and bloggers and op-ed columnists and editorial writers are all over it, but since the nomination is all but decided, I prefer to think about how we might be able to move on.

Clearly no one as yet has gotten through to Hillary Clinton that it is mathematically inconceivable that she can win the nomination even if she secures the best deals possible in Florida and Michigan.

Some have suggested that Harold Ickes or Terry McAuliffe or Dianne Feinstein need to have a private talk with her about a dignified exit. I doubt if that will happen or work. At this point, after he failed to deliver North Carolina for her, no one thinks she would even listen to her husband. In fact, on Tuesday night he was given a jet of his own and sent back to Chappaqua. I suspect we have seen the last of him on the campaign trail.

So it’s up to Chelsea.

It could be that this dogged, never-say-die tenacity that has been so commented about is less about Hillary’s personal ambition than a gift-by-example to her daughter.

How, especially as a woman, when the odds in this gender-biased society are stacked against you, to be a true equal to men, you need to show at least equal grit and determination. “Unless we do so,” she may be saying, “we will never break through the ultimate glass ceiling.” Isn’t this unwillingness to compromise and concede at the core of so much of Clinton’s appeal to her voter base?

During this long campaign Hillary as mother has seen her daughter come into her own. At first, when the very-private Chelsea (as the press described her) materialized on the campaign trail she stood silently in the background, smiling, clapping, and nodding as she listened to her mother’s stump speech. A bit later she went off on her own, mainly to college campuses, and found her voice. In fact, this Wednesday morning in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in the face of boos and calls from the crowd to “End the dynasty!” (see NY Times article linked below), a brave Chelsea introduced her understandably deflated mom.

Now then it is time for Chelsea to say to her mother—perhaps this Sunday on Mother’s Day—

I love you more than you can imagine. You not only nurtured me but also have inspired me by your example. I now fully see what is possible for me and others who face discrimination because of gender or race. I do not want the public’s final memory of you from this historic campaign to be that of a desperate person. A desperate woman who inadvertently, from exhaustion, says things that are untrue to your nature. I don’t want to see you caricatured. You have been too special to me and to the country.

If that doesn’t work, Chelsea can add, And remember mom, there’s always 2012!