Clinton's Mad Quest

Turns out a whole state had a primary yesterday -- who knew? You'd think all of that kind of thing would've been cancelled so networks could cover Eliot Spitzer 24/7. Nothing like a good ol' fashioned hooker scandal to suck up all the oxygen in the newsroom. About the only time I've seen the election campaigns mentioned in regular news rotation was to mention that Spitzer backed Hillary. It's kind of a "who cares?" sort of thing, since until a few days ago, he was widely respected on the left and the endorsement was worth bragging about. I don't see how you can fault her for it; as far as anyone knew, he was the cleanest guy on Earth.

That state that had it's primary yesterday? Turns out it's some place down south called "Mississippi." Barack Obama won. In fact, losing Mississippi wasn't the only bad news Team Clinton got yesterday; she also lost Texas.

CNN:

Sen. Barack Obama will win Mississippi's Democratic primary, CNN projects.

Sen. Barack Obama leads in the overall delegate count, according to CNN calculations.

Obama will also finish first in the Texas Democratic caucuses, which were held last week.

He will get more delegates out of the state than rival Sen. Hillary Clinton, who won the state's primary.

Not the best news she's gotten all week. Remember, Hillary has to win freakin' landslides to even get close to Obama's delegate count and, so far, that hasn't been happening. In fact, with the way Texas has panned out, she's actually losing ground.

Which means she has to win even bigger landslides down the road. Unless Barack Obama is caught with his own hooker, that's just not going to happen.

And that's where Clinton is right now -- her only hope is that Obama loses the nomination with an amazing screw up. There's no way that she can win it. Even her attack machine isn't making much of a dent, In fact, if Mississippi's exit polling is any reflection of the rest of the nation, all she's managing to do is polarize her own voters.

Associated Press reports that "Seventy-two percent of Clinton voters said they would be dissatisfied if Obama wins the nomination. Fifty-seven percent of Obama voters would be dissatisfied with Clinton." This despite the fact that "20 percent of Clinton voters said Obama is more likely than Clinton to beat Sen. John McCain; only 5 percent of Obama voters said Clinton was more likely than their candidate to defeat McCain." If a full one fifth of Clinton voters think Obama stands a better chance and nearly three-quarters are basically saying "anyone but Obama," then it pretty much tells us that Clinton has trained her voters to hate Obama. I'm sorry, which camp is supposed to be the "cult?"

The utter brainlessness of this is difficult to express in words. It would require some sort of primal ceremony that monkeys perform to truly capture its boneheadedness. At this point, Obama is about 99.9% certain to be the nominee and Clinton is treating him as if he were a Republican opponent. Hillary Clinton's campaign has moved beyond hopeless into stupid. Breaking the party is about the most braindead thing you could possibly do after Bush. '08 was (and, at this point, probably still is) a gimme. But Clinton's campaign is one of diminishing returns -- not only for herself, but for Barack Obama. Her ambition is not more important than putting a Democrat in the White House. You want to say, "President McCain," for the next four years?

Then say, "Yay for Hillary!" now.

I'm not even going to get into just how dirty and lousy and unfair her campaign against Obama has been. At least, not in depth -- you could write a damned book. The smear emails have been bad enough. Saying that John Freakin' McCain is more qualified was bad enough. Now she plays the race card -- while pretending that Obama's playing it.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position," Clinton-backer Geraldine Ferraro told a California newspaper. "He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

Can you imagine how Clintonistas would be clawing their eyes out and climbing the walls if an Obama backer had said Hillary was only a frontrunner because she was a woman? We'd never hear the end of it.

And, when called on it, Ferraro claims that the Obama camp is playing the race card. "David Axelrod, his campaign manager, has chose to spin this as a racist comment because everytime anybody makes a comment about race who is white — he did it with Bill Clinton, he was successful; he did it with (Pennsylvania governor and Clinton supporter) Ed Rendell, he was less successful; and he is certainly not going to be successful with me," Ferraro said in response to the crapstorm she created.

See how that works? You get to attack someone for being black, but when they come to their own defense, they're playing the race card. Bass-ackward. She's clearly making the "affirmative action" argument, where anyone who's a minority and successful owes their success to their race. The unspoken implication is that minorities are never worthy of their positions. But pointing out that she's making that argument is some sort of reverse racism. Issues of race in America are hands-off to anyone other than the Clinton campaign, apparently. They get to talk about it all they want, but everyone else has to shut the hell up about it or they're being unfair.

There are a lot of issues of importance in this campaign. There are a lot of substantive arguments to be made. There are policy differences between Clinton and Obama that can be discussed. There is absolutely no reason why this process has to be dragged through the damned mud and get mired down with this dumbass, dirty, BS crap. If Hillary Clinton has nothing else to run on other than how much Barack Obama sucks, then we've got to question how good her arguments for herself can be. So far, all we've gotten is stupidity, brutality, and insults.

And it's breaking the party. At this point, calling for Hillary to step aside is futile. She's clearly beyond reason. But there has to be someone in her campaign who has some damned class, some group of superdelegates out there who still value truth -- someone, somewhere has to be able to tell her to tone it the hell down. That getting the debate and the campaign back on track means talking about substantive differences, not mudslinging and character assassination. Someone has to point out that Hillary's campaign is one hair's-width away from having a supporter call Obama a racist slur.

She can't win. Whatever lunatic crusade she's on, it can't succeed. All it can do is throw her party's chances in November out the window. Someone needs to tell her that the nation's more important than she is. Someone in her campaign has to tell her to wise up. If she's not going to quit, that she can act like a Democrat and not Karl Rove. Someone needs to tell her that trying to convince everyone that Barack Obama's the devil isn't going to do anyone any good.

Unfortunately, I think that's probably wishful thinking. For the Clintonistas, no one and nothing is more important than her ambition. Expecting sanity from that camp is obviously a pipe dream.

--Wisco

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