Whether the Clintons want to admit it or not, the official close of the primary season on Tuesday marked the end of their 16 year domination over the Democratic Party.The man who thrives on being the bride at every wedding and corpse at every funeral never surrendered the reins of his party when he left the White House; he just loaned them to cronies like Terry McAuliffe.
Contrary to popular opinion, the 42nd president was as much of an albatross around the neck of his understudy as he was an asset.When Clinton got caught with his pants down, he paraded Al Gore as his leading apologist.In a rare candid moment with the press, Clinton returned that favor by comparing his vice-president to Richard Nixon at the start of the Democratic primaries and then abandoned his home state of Arkansas to further his wife’s own White House ambitions.
Had Clinton stood by Arkansas and Arkansas stood by the Democratic Party, Florida would have been academic.
Clinton proved just as helpful to John Kerry’s bid unintentionally stealing his post-convention thunder by broadcasting his health problems to the world.After Kerry lost one of the closest presidential elections in American history (it only appeared to be a landslide in the shadow of 2000), Clinton’s henchmen publicly tore into the Massachusetts Brahmin in Newsweek to nuke any prospect of another run in 2008 (it should be remembered that Kerry ended his presidential bid with a substantial surplus in his warchest).
And so with Howard Dean bought off with the DNC chairmanship, Kerry scuttled and Gore disinterested, Hillary Clinton was poised to take the nomination in a walk.
And then the media invented Barack Obama.
An unknown Illinois state legislator parlayed a prime-time speaking engagement before the 2004 convention into a political mania that inexplicably sustained itself for four years and…well you saw Fr. Pfleger’s sermon.
So what happened?
A mixture of socialistic party rules and Clintonian arrogance mixed with pinches of blatant media bias, Clinton loathing and Deanism.Whatever votes Hillary lost due to sexism were more than made up by votes she received from Democrats who didn’t want a black president.
1) The DNC’s Fool Rules: Had the Democratic primaries been run under Republican rules, Hillary Clinton would have been her party’s nominee.But affirmative action is a hell of a thing.That a candidate could win Texas by over 100,000 votes and only net four more delegates than the second place finisher is absurd.But those are the rules.And her people could have changed them.Engineering the early Nevada caucuses proved to be hardly proactive or productive.
2) Oops:While running up a $95,000 deli bill in Iowa, Team Clinton never took Obama seriously, despite his massive fundraising receipts early on.They lacked a game plan for post-Super Tuesday and paid dearly for it.
3) Johnnie Edwards, We Hardly Knew You:One could argue that the beginning of the end for Hillary was the beginning of the delegate contests.Hillary running third in the Iowa caucuses was not nearly as fatal to her candidacy as John Edwards running second.This writer surmised that the math was always going to be in her favor since winning a majority of the female vote in a multi-candidate field would spell out pluralities, or first-place finishes sans a majority, in the early contests.But with Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson’s abysmal finishes in the early running combined with Edwards’s inability to break out in Iowa meant that the anti-Clinton voters would not be divided but could coalesce around the lone alternative.
4) The Bad Clinton Aftertaste: I’ve always maintained that the Clintons were never as popular within the party ranks as they were with the general public. And that’s a major problem with a system where activists dominate the delegate selection process.In addition to the aforementioned “victims” of the Clintons, their trademark tire-treads can also be found on the backs of issues that are important to the core Democratic constituency.Remember Bill and NAFTA?What about Hillary’s war vote?
5) The Deaniacs Cometh: When MoveOn.org declared to the DNC that they bought and owned them, they weren’t kidding.Those college students and other assorted latte liberals who swelled the ranks of the former Vermont governor’s presidential bid didn’t forget Hillary’s games of political twister and waited on the sidelines for the next opportunity to spread their brand of revolution.A few might have even found better-paying jobs since 2004, in which some of the disposable portions of their income were sent to BarackObama.com.What Obama inherited in 2008 weren’t naïve activists but seasoned operatives who learned the political trade through the Dean campaign.
6) Yes Virginia, There IS a Media Bias:I no longer feel bad for the way Republicans are treated by journalists after this one, as the Fourth Estate giddily went out of their way to declare Hillary’s candidacy DOA while the delegate margin was far from insurmountable, particularly with so many “super-delegates” on the loose going into June.Just as the media prefaced every 2004 Bush trip to Ohio with a line about the sour economy there, so they spiked Hillary’s ‘impossible” campaign in the later months.The MediaResearchCenter might want to keep their eyes out for a generous check from a W.J. Clinton in the next few months.
7) Et tu Cassius?:And finally, what could be more ironic than the wife of America’s first “black president” being sunk by black voters?There is little doubt that had Obama demurred, black voters would have been the foundation of Hillary’s nomination.Without this key segment, Hillary was assured of lopsided losses in the Deep South and no better than marginal victories in states where black voters are a significant portion of a state’s electorate.
And so, Barack Obama has achieved the biggest upset on the Democratic side since Jimmy Who? won the nomination in 1976 while simultaneously unshackling the destiny of the Democratic Party from the interests of the Clintons.
Of course I must add that in no way am I implying that this commission, the CFR or any internationalist banking interests control or even have the slightest influence in our governance. That is - of course - completely in the hands of "we the people" though the honest and forthright endeavors of our elected public servants. Thank Gawd fo dat too yeah Dawlin'. Written by kpf
on 6/5/2008
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I agree this article is a very fine summation of events. Brilliant even. However I must comment on the "Jimmy Who" reference. Jimmy Carter was certainly known to Big Money before he "came from nowhere" to win the Democratic nomination (I think David Rockefeller could be considered "Big Money"). One quote from the link below: “In the 1980 election, it was revealed that Carter and his two major opponents, John B. Anderson and George H. W. Bush, were also members, and the Commission became a campaign issue."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission Written by kpf
on 6/5/2008
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