Beacon Street Journal

Charles Krauthammer reviews the tortured history of Hillary’s ineffective and ever-changing campaign strategy and credits her for finally adopting a winning strategy against Obama, But alas, it proved too little too late

But going left proved disastrous for Clinton. It abolished all significant policy differences between her and Obama, the National Journal’s 2007 most liberal senator. On health care, for example, her attempts to turn a minor difference in the definition of universality into a major assault on Obama fell flat. With no important policy differences separating them, the contest became one of character and personality. Matched against this elegant, intellectually nimble, hugely talented newcomer, she had no chance of winning that contest.

She tried everything. Her charges that he was a man of nothing but words came off as a petulant, envious attack on eloquence. The power to inspire may not be sufficient to qualify for the presidency, but it is hardly a liability.

She tried a silly plagiarism charge, then settled for the experience card. In a change election, this was not a brilliant strategy. It forced her to dwell on the 1990s, playing candidate of the past to Obama’s candidate of the future. Her studied attempts to embellish her experience led her into a thicket of confabulated Bosnian sniper fire.

It wasn’t until late in the fourth quarter that she found the seam in Obama’s defense. In fact, Obama handed her the playbook with Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Michelle Obama’s comments about never having been proud of America and Obama’s own guns-and-God condescension toward small-town whites.

But Hillary overplayed her hand, especially with her gas-tax gimmickry, which most voters were astute enough to recognize it for what it was: more pandering and political expediency from a woman most knew would do anything and say anything to get elected. 

And now what? The Wall Street Journal sees the party as in the midst of a painful, but necessary divorce from the Clintons’. It took 10 years, but you might say Democrats have finally voted to impeach. The historical irony of many Democrats’ sudden astonishment of the mores of Bill and Hillary is noted:

More remarkable still, Democrats supporting Mr. Obama had a revelation about Clintonian mores. David Geffen, channeling William Safire, declared that “everybody in politics lies,” but the Clintons “do it with such ease, it’s troubling.” Ted Kennedy was shocked to see the Clintons play the race card in South Carolina. The media discovered their secrecy over tax records and Clinton Foundation donors, while columnists were appalled to hear her assail Mr. Obama for his associations with radical bomber William Ayers. Listen closely and you could almost hear Bob Dole asking, “Where’s the outrage?”

By the time Mrs. Clinton made her famous claim about dodging Bosnian sniper fire, Democrats and their media friends no longer called it a mere gaffe, as they once might have. This time the remark was said to be emblematic of her entire political career. The same folks who had believed her about Whitewater and the rest now claimed she never tells the truth about anything.

As the scales suddenly fell from liberal eyes, the most striking statistic was the one in this week’s North Carolina exit poll. Asked if they considered Mrs. Clinton “honest and trustworthy,” no fewer than 50% of Democratic primary voters said she was not. In Indiana, the figure was merely 45%.

Though she intends to soldier on, party unity be damned, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post  thinks Hillary needs to be stopped before her “majestic sense of entitlement” burns the house down along racial lines. A question though for Robinson and other pundits who now find Hillary’s tactics of self-aggrandizement so odious, yet who defended tenaciously  the reprehensible character of the Clintons when they occupied the White House: aren’t you former Clinton enablers in part responsible for the havoc the practitioners of the “politics of personal destruction” have now wreaked on the Democratic Party itself? Why should the Clintons now heed calls to cease their slash-and-burn tactics when it served them so well in the past? Also, as loathsome as the Clintons’ race-baiting is, shouldn’t the “post-racial” candidate, the transcendent New Messiah share some of the blame for the racial polarization that now plagues the party?

George Will’s post-mortem: For Hillary, too little, too late. 

I agree, but then there was the mind-numbing phoniness, patent Clinton chicanery and inauthenticity. Did her demise begin in Selma?

In retrospect, she ran one of the worst campaigns in modern American political history.

Oh, Oh…

It looks like the Democratic Party’s festering sores are about to split open. All aboard! Next stop, Denver!!

Train wreck ahead?

In the wake of Obama’s struggle with securing white blue-collar voters of the Democratic Party, many left wing commentators as well as some mainstream media journalists, have found particular solace in explaining his lack of appeal to certain segments of what was once the bedrock coalition of the party, as a result of either explicit or implicit racism. We have all heard the conspiratorial and hidden message refrains: any attempt to get out and secure the blue-collar white vote is blowing the “race” dog-whistle; arguments about Obama’s “electability” are, at root, code words for the country is not ready to elect a black man president.

The New York Times John Harwood argues that part of the problem related to divisions within the party rests with the rules changes adopted by the Democratic Party itself during the McGovern candidacy:

Mr. McGovern became the Democratic standard-bearer in 1972. But the party’s new approach to the nominating process helped label Democrats as catering to their component parts rather than the broad electorate. “The idea of quotas, the concept itself which McGovern supported, was to be one of the major factors in the wrecking of his campaign,” Theodore H. White wrote in his book “The Making of the President 1972.” Mr. White saw this change as a profound ideological reordering. “The beautiful Liberal Idea of the previous half-century,” he observed, “had grown old and hardened into a Liberal Theology which terrified millions of its old clients.” That theology was dominated, in part, by what would come to be known as “identity politics.”

While this in part, explains the phenomenon of the discrete tribalism that seems to have reared its head in the recent primary contests (i.e, god and guns Democrats resistant to Obama’s latte-liberal message), it doesn’t squarely address the blue-collar white voter as closet racist proposition. In this regard, many view the failure of blue-collar whites to embrace the candidacy of Obama as an express form of racism:

“Racism is deep in the culture of this country,” said Roger Wilkins, an author who was an assistant attorney general in the Johnson White House and whose daughter has worked in the Obama campaign. “I’m surprised that it took the Wright business to put it out on the table.”

In any case, the racial divide that has opened up within the Democratic Party is almost certainly less problematic than the hurdles Mr. Obama could face attracting support outside the party in November should he win the nomination. It is, after all, the Republican Party that captured the allegiance of the whites most uneasy about the civil rights movement and its legacy.

“It will be a challenge to win a general election with an African-American candidate,” said Larry Bartels, a professor of politics at Princeton. “The challenge has less to with internal tensions within the Democratic Party than with the resentments and racial misgivings of the general electorate.”

An expression of the extreme variant of this proposition can be found in the pages of the far left publication The Nation. Here is Richard Kim’s expostulation on the phenomenon:

Departed advisor Mark Penn has said that the working class is “a critical vote” that superdelegates should consider because “these are voters who in the past have gone either way in the general election….”

Give me a break. We’re not talking about swing voters, Catholics or the working class en masse. We’re talking about the white, working class. As Mark Penn surely knows, it’s not black working-class voters who “swing” the other way…

Are white working-class voters really racist? How many and where? If a significant number of them are, should Democrats really court them on the terms of their racism? These are questions worth asking since, apparently, a lot of Democrats think they’re valid. But as long as the Clinton campaign continues to code the fact that it is counting on a base of white racist support, we’ll never have this conversation. And as long as the mainstream media indulges the euphemism of “electability”–one that makes white racism seem like a personal deficiency of Barack Obama’s–we’ll be stuck mucking around in diffuse fears and anxieties that nobody, least of all Hillary Clinton, wants to name.

So here’s my final suggestion: as long as Barack Obama is called upon to explain, denounce and reject black racism, let’s have it both ways. Let’s have George Stephanopoulos ask Hillary Clinton how she feels about the white racist vote?

There is a component of silliness in the thesis that ties Obama’s electoral misfortunes directly to white racism. Let me see if I understand the argument. As indicated by an analysis of recent primary results, 90% of blacks are voting for Obama, and at best, 60% of whites are voting for Hillary. Yet, it is the white voters who are voting based on race? Many of those who are enthralled with the “code word” racial theory concerning Obama’s appeal to white voters are simply re-stoking an old media template that just won’t die. “Racism” as a sociological concept is strictly a one-way street. Think Duke Rape Case. Were we to impute the exact same sinister and hidden motives to black voters as proponents of the “Obama is losing because of white racism” theory apply to white voters, couldn’t one argue forcefully that it is the African-Americans for Obama whose votes are racially motivated?

For those enamored by and wedded to the theory of voting behavior as exclusively racially motivated, let me suggest a thought experiment. Are you listening MSNBC’s Chris Matthews? Is it possible that many blue-collar white voters may be voting against Obama because they feel his value system or world-view is decidedly out of sync with theirs (remember the elitist and disparaging bitter and clinging comments)? Could they be rejecting his increasingly apparent hard-left big government Liberalism, and not merely the color of his skin? By the same token, could African-American be voting en masse for Obama because of intrinsic ethnic pride (remember Catholics voting for JFK?), and that through the vehicle of his candidacy he embodies their collective aspirations for the potential of having the first black elected president? 

Although it is never expressly stated, one of the underlying presuppositions of those who attribute Obama’s troubles with blue-collar white voters to prejudice, is that in their eyes, Obama definitively disposed of the issue of race with this Philadelphia speech. Given this specious assumption, the logical conclusion for them is that anyone voting against Obama must be racist. Q.E.D.

Despite the exultation of the media, the unpleasant reality for Obama — and his supporters — is that he did not conlusively nor satisfactorily explain his long-standing voluntary association with his incindiary and racist preacher. He began his campaign with the promise that he was going to be the transcendent candidate. His words and his deeds have fallen far short of the mark he established. The irony is that it is the post-racial candidate himself who is the one primarily responsible for many within his own party questioning whether he has the requisite character and judgment to fulfill his promised role. Those who express their doubts in the voting booth are not racists, but rather, realists.

Indiana could prove to be the Last Hurrah for Hillary’s campaign strategy of convincing the superdelegates she is the more electable of the two candidates. Demographically speaking, Indiana was a state tailor-made for another replication of her Pennsylvania triumph over Obama in terms of securing blue-collar white voters disaffected with Obama’s core message and purported elitism. But, with all the travails that have beset the Obama campaign over the past two weeks, she managed to barely eke out a slender 4 point win. What happened?

In light of Obama’s crushing 14 point victory in North Carolina and Hillary’s slim victory in Indiana, it is difficult to reconcile all the recent polling data concerning the effect the Jeremiah Wright fiasco has had on Obama’s candidacy. While it is apparent that the Wright controversy has hurt Obama among some white voters, obviously, it didn’t prove fatal to his prospects in North Carolina, nor, for that matter in Indiana, where any anticipated fallout from Wright didn’t materialize in any meaningful way to Hillary’s advantage.

Whereas both Democratic candidates have serious — perhaps even fatal — flaws, when Democratic primary voters must choose one over the other, revulsion becomes a relative concept. While his association with Reverend Wright has clearly had negative ramifications for his candidacy, let’s take a hard look at Obama’s opponent. For, in the Democratic race for the nomination, the Gods have singularly blessed Obama with an opponent who will go down as perhaps the worst presidential candidate in recent American political history. 

First there was Queen Hillary, imperturbable, sitting regally atop her perch, waiting for her “inevitable coronation. Cold, aloof, arrogant, the message went out to primary voters: you better get aboard before the train leaves the station. Next came the aggrieved Hillary, the scorned feminist icon. The boys were “piling on” and she assiduously played and cultivated the sympathy card. Next came the fighting Hillary, “I’m your gal” she exclaimed. Lastly, she morphed into a gun-toting Annie Oakley; a boilermaker, beer chasing, gas-pumping, pick-up driving working class hero. The pandering was obvious, especially the gas-tax promises aimed against “Big Oil.”

At each stage of the multiple-personality journey, the questioned remained the same: which is the real Hillary. Dizzy from watching the constant personality transmogrifications, which in essence, reeked of inauthenticity, many Democrats decided that enough was enough. Perhaps even for Democratic primary voters, it was all so palatably phony, so contrived, so insincere, that they decided even when faced with Obama’s obvious shortcomings, they had seen enough and decided to send the Bosnian Sniper-dodging inveterate liar packing.

Will she now drop out? I think not. She has not come this far to surrender. There are several primaries lift. Perhaps she is waiting for the other Reverend Wright shoe to drop.  Perhaps she is scheming for a run in 2012. But, based on what we’ve seen so far, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Hillary, with cyborg indefatigability will soldier on…

Why is it that every time Michelle Obama gives her distressing stump speech on the campaign trail the picture that emerges is one of a hectoring, angry, bitter woman, with a gigantic chip on her shoulder? Last Friday in North Carolina, she treated supporters to more of her familiar gospel of despair. Yuval Levin of NRO highlights the characteristically negative view of the nation from America’s Unhappiest Millionaire:

It is an hour-long talk to supporters who just want something to cheer about, and who get some opportunities at the outset, but then find themselves treated to a profoundly and relentlessly negative vision of American life.

She first offers, as she often does in her appearances, a kind of victim’s history of the 2008 Democratic primary race. In Mrs. Obama’s telling, the Obama campaign becomes not an extraordinary mix of strategy and skill, but a sad reflection on the unfairness of American life. The bar, we are told, is always being raised just as her husband is about to reach it. They said he couldn’t win because he didn’t have an organization. Then he built an organization, so they said he couldn’t win because he didn’t have money. He raised money, so they said he couldn’t win because he couldn’t win caucuses. He won caucuses, so they said he couldn’t win because he couldn’t win primaries.

In the tone and substance of the story is the implication that the fact that this race isn’t over is evidence of a profound injustice done to her husband. “The bar is constantly changing for this man,” she tells us. Of course, the only relevant bar in an election is whether you win a majority, and Sen. Obama has yet to win a majority of Democratic delegates. If he did, the race would be over. The bar’s not moving.

But this tale of woe is really only an introduction to a larger and more sweeping list of bars getting raised just as hard working people are reaching for them. “So the bar has been shifting and moving in this race,” she says, “but the irony is, the sad irony is, that’s exactly what is happening to most Americans in this country.”

In Michelle Obama’s America, everybody’s suffering, no one has time to make any friends, no one earns enough to eke out a living anymore, and the bar of success is always being moved just out of reach. “Folks are struggling like never before,” she says, and in a nation struggling like never before, society cannot stand the strain.

She is the despondent Yin to Barack’s Yang; he talks of Hope, she never sees anything but Despair. America is a “sick” nation whose citizens souls are broken. The remedy? Why naturally, electing Barack Obama President. And Barack’s cure?

Barack will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

Good Heavens! If Obama gets elected, it sounds like Michelle is going to send those of us who are “uninformed” or who may fervently wish to remain uninvolved, to a Liberal Gulag for re-education.

Christopher Hitchens suggests that in part, based on a reading of her Princeton thesis, it very well may have been Michelle’s decision to remain as parishioners in Wright’s Trininty United Church. Her persistent ode to melancholy on the campaign trail doe seems more consistent with Jeremiah Wright’s view of America. Hitchens inquires: are we going to be getting two for the price of one again?

There he was, Al “Don’t confuse me with the facts, the science is settled” Gore preaching again to the choir at a receptive university audience in Columbus, Ohio.

The polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, droughts are dragging on, floods are getting stronger and today alone, an additional 170 million tons of carbon dioxide has been dumped into the Earth’s atmosphere, he told a crowd of believers at Value City Arena.

“The planet has a fever,” he said. It needs to be saved, to be fixed immediately.

“This is our home. We don’t have another planet to go to. Don’t let anybody tell you we’re going to get on rocket ships and go to a new planet. We couldn’t even evacuate New Orleans.”

“He’s not saying anything new. He’s just collecting everything and presenting it in a forceful manner. He just makes the point very convincingly,” said Christian Schnell, a graduate student from Germany who attended Gore’s presentation and is studying math. The problem for Gore is that, indeed, from him, we’ve heard it all before. The polar ice-caps are melting!, the oceans are rising!, we’re all going to die!, blah blah, blah, blah… When it comes to global warming hysteria, as he continues to endlessly drone on, Al Gore has been reduced to a tiresome and predictable agent of regurgitation. Impervious to credible doubts raised about his hypothesis, his script remains the same.

What we haven’t heard and never will hear from Al Gore is his response to contrary and credible scientific evidence that clearly disputes the theoretical underpinning of his global warming apocalyptic vision. Gore has no answer to a recent German scientific study that concludes that there will be no global warming for the next ten years:

Let’s call it Apocalypse Postponed. At least temporarily.

German climate scientists have just published a study in the respected science journal Nature suggesting global warming has stopped and will not resume until at least 2015.

In other words (my words, not theirs) contrary to the received wisdom of Al Gore’s simplistic and propagandistic An Inconvenient Truth, global temperatures aren’t moving in lockstep with rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the science isn’t settled and we don’t know everything we need to know.

Based on new, computer-generated climate models that factor in natural ocean currents, the researchers conclude: “Our results suggest that global surface temperatures may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic (man-made) warming.”

How does Gore respond to scientific studies such as these that dispute his core thesis? He “responds” by ignoring them. Gore is starting to remind me of those medieval scholars who in spite of Copernicus’ unassailable scientific findings, continued to stick their heads in the sand and cling to their outmoded Aristotelian view of the universe. Perhaps this is why, time and again, Gore has refused to debate the issue of global warming with anyone who questions his fraudulent assumptions. His “theories” as well as his “facts” are incapable of withstanding scrutiny or refutation.

It’s 2001, and there he is, in full 60’s flashback mode, stomping on an American Flag. A great photo of Bill Ayers to go along with the August, 2001 article “No Regrets” that appeared in Chicago magazine. I can just hear Obama’s explanation for the flag desecration now…Context people, context.

Sorry Obama, it’s about judgment, or lack thereof. In terms of clarification, Jeremiah Wright as the “crazy uncle in the attic” ultimately didn’t sell, and Obama’s affinity for Bill Ayers is more substantive than he is letting on. At some point, Obama is going to have to give a more meaningful explanation of his personal relationship with this unrepentant domestic terrorist. Like the twenty-year association he had with Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s initial attempts to dismiss his relationship with Bill Ayers as trivial and unimportant is not going to suffice. As LGF, sarcastically notes, Obama was much older than 8 when the photograph was taken. Ayers and his wife helped launch Obama’s career in the Illinois State Senate, and they both hosted a fundraiser for him at their home when he kicked off his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

I suspect that in the end, Obama’s “I’m friends with anti-abortion Senator Tom Coburn” moral equivalence justification is going to be no more successful than was his equivocal attempts to distance himself from his “spiritual advisor.”

In light of the daunting task of overcoming Obama’s pledged delegate lead, many are asking why Hillary continues to soldier on given the damage she is inflicting on the party and Obama’s chances of prevailing in the general election.  Some have raised the specter that Hillary, while consigned to defeat in 2008, is really laying the groundwork for a run again in 2012 should McCain win the general election. Of course this strategy is effective only if Obama loses against McCain.

I find this scenario highly implausible for a number of different reasons. First, there is the issue of black support for any putative run Hillary may want to make in 2012. Proponents of the “Hillary is running for the 2012 nomination” theory argue that a linchpin to her strategy is that she must be extremely careful with her attacks on her rival so as not to alienate the black constituency of the Democratic Party. The problem here is that the damage in her relationship with black voters has already been done. 

Representative James Clyburn, one of the most highly respected black leaders in Congress, told The Times that there is an almost unanimous belief among blacks that the Clintons were committed to damaging Senator Obama so badly that even if he wins the nomination he would never be able to win the general election.

Do you suppose that if Obama loses a general election contest against McCain, the African-American constituency of the Democratic Party will simply say all is forgiven and throw their support behind Hillary? Clearly, this is wishful thinking. And, without the solid support of blacks, no Democratic presidential candidate can ever win the White House. For this reason alone, any attempts by Hillary to reappear on the scene as the “presumptive favorite” of the party in 2012 are simply Quixotic.

Secondly, the media loathes Hillary. For them, she is yesterday’s news and they view her as the chief impediment to the coronation of the new object of their affections: Barack Obama. Her parsing, prevarications and bald-face lies, which they so eagerly overlooked in the past, they now find revolting. Husband Bill is viewed now not as a crowd-pleasing celebrity in the party, but rather as an aging rock star whose act has been upstaged by one who sings melodies of Hope and Change more to their liking. Should a wounded Obama suffer a defeat in the general election, the long knives of many journalists would be out for Hillary, as they would hold her primarily responsible for the party’s defeat. Any pre-Obama fawning over her “inevitability” would give rise to merciless and unrelenting attacks on her defective character, her expediency and her trustworthiness.

Thirdly, many of the Democratic Party’s elites are not terribly fond of the Clintons. As they have watched the tactics from the old Clinton Administration play out endlessly through the vehicle of Hillary’s candidacy, many Democrats, who out of party loyalty, were forced to bear witness to the moral fiber of their party being corroded, now, in exasperation, say never again. Obama has given the Democratic Party a chance to perform penance for their previous support, enabling and justification of the terrible mendacity of the Clintons. It is highly dubious that the Clintons’ will be afforded a third opportunity to represent their party in 2012.

In short, the only reason Hillary is running a scorched-earth campaign is that she knows it is now or never…

Michelle Obama notifies us that Barack is boiling over with anger over the tenacity of the Jeremiah Wright controversy that continues to plague his campaign.

Michelle Obama lifted the lid on the irritation felt by the leading Democrat candidate for the White House at the way anti-American outbursts by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, have dogged his campaign.

He is said to be itching to turn all his fire on John McCain, the Republican candidate, who is benefiting most from Mr Obama’s protracted tussle with Hillary Clinton.

Mrs Obama told a rally in Durham, North Carolina, on Friday that only her husband’s desire to change US politics had helped him to control his feelings: “Barack is always thinking three steps ahead – what do we need to do to make change.”

Her husband was thinking “I can’t let my ego, my anger, my frustration get in the way of the ultimate goal,” she said.

It’s nice to know Obama is not letting his ego get in the way of the “ultimate goal” — and that would be what exactly? Ushering in a “new era” of politics, or doing whatever is politically expedient to secure the nomination? 

Perhaps the predicament of the Obama campaign can best be summarized with this gem of a lament from Michelle: ”Barack has been characterised as many things that have nothing to do with who he is.” Sorry Michelle, as indicated by some distressing recent polling data, Obama’s recent troubles stem directly from the fact that many voters do know exactly who Obama is. The New Messiah routine was all but impossible to maintain in light of his multiple and contradictory responses to his voluntary association with his racist, anti-American preacher. Bizarre justifications of The Exalted One’s supporters notwithstanding, the reality is all that’s left is an ordinary calculating politician whose motives have always been based on expediency, not altruism.

That Michelle and Barack Obama now profess anger and dismay that the mythologizing has been exposed and his sheen tarnished, shows just how clueless and out of touch this couple is with the rest of the nation they would seek to lead.