"The Clintons Will Do Anything—Anything—To Win The Nomination For Hillary, The Popular Vote Be Blasted."
hughhewitt.townhall.com
Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 8:17 AM
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Two of the smartest guys I know -- Victor Davis Hanson and Peter Robinson-- had a debate about whether Senator Clinton or Senator Obama would prevail. Peter describes it here.
Ed Rendell's easy dealing of the race card noted below underscores Hanson's assertion about the Clinton's playing to win.
The Democrats are and remain a party of bosses -- union bosses, interest group bosses like the folks running NOW and Emily's List, and even the netroots' bosses like Kos. An Obama nomination would be a shattering event for all of these established and powerful hierarchies. It isn't impossible given the extraordinary grassroots momentum he is generating, but because an Obama victory would be so unprecedented it is hard to imagine its consequences.
Turning Obama back after his long stretch of wins would engender a great deal of bitterness as Peter notes, a disappointment not likely to be appreciably reduced y the almost inevitable offer of the vice presidency.
But an Obama nomination would be so destabilizing for Beltway bigs and their networked supporters that the effects could be deeply destructive for leadership elites through the various power centers. When the revolution gets going, doesn't the Obama precedent spread through, say, the AFL-CIO and the NAACP and The Human Rights Campaign with demands by new voices that they be heard and that change come to their organizations as well?
The GOP is unsettled right now, but the smash-up underway within the Democrats could easily become the biggest since their 1968-1972 convulsions.
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell is a Clinton guy through and through. And he's doing his best to help reverse the slow collapse of Hillary's campaign, even to the point of playing the race card against Barack Obama with a warning that some whites won't vote for the Illinois senator:
"You've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate," Rendell told the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in remarks that appeared in yesterday's edition.
Rendell cited his 2006 reelection campaign, in which he defeated Republican challenger Lynn Swann, the former Pittsburgh Steelers star, winning about 60 percent of the vote.
"I believe, looking at the returns in my election, that had Lynn Swann been the identical candidate that he was - well-spoken, charismatic, good-looking - but white instead of black, instead of winning by 22 points, I would have won by 17 or so," he said. "And that [attitude] exists. But on the other hand, that is counterbalanced by Obama's ability to bring new voters into the electoral pool."
These sorts of observations, when made at all by elected officials, used to be routinely coupled with the appropriate denunciation of the racist attitude implicit in such a decision-making process. Leaders were expected to exercise leadership by rejecting the very idea of race-based voting, not to accomodate it through suggesting strategic voting against minority candidates who might be more vulnerable in general elections. If Rendell made the traditional denunciation to the Post-Gazette, it is unrecorded. Asserting that 5% of the Pennsylvania electorate of 2006 was racist is a way for Rendell to scare Democratic primary voters in the big contests remaining, and such appeals to fear used to be out-of-bounds as a naked play to voters' worst instincts.
But when push comes to shove, the Clintons and their allies don't hesitate to break all the rules as often as is necessary to win -- a characteristic that has to be contributing to her accelerating slide downhill both in tactics and results.
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