Monday, March 31, 2008

Go, Hillary!

There's a phrase you probably didn't expect to hear from me. But I mean it, I'm serious: go, Hillary, go! As in, go away. We have some lovely parting gifts for you.

It's time for the media to give Clinton the Ron Paul treatment: play her for laughs, but recognize that the nomination is not and cannot be hers and stop giving her credence she has not earned. She is not a viable candidate for the White House.

Her campaign could be quirkily quixotic, a la Huckabee, but she is neither gracious nor charming nor apparently hanging in for the sake of principle while acknowledging the writing is on the wall. She seems to be fueled by an unnerving combination of of ambition and delusion.

Hillary Clinton is the new Joe Lieberman. The Democrats of Connecticut spoke and told Joe he was done; but he wouldn't take "go away" for an answer, and now he's standing beside John McCain, correcting his foreign policy gaffes. Hillary, America has spoken.

She claims the opposite; she's arguing it's anti-democratic to call a candidate out while there are still votes to count. Tell that to Edwards, Richardson, Kucinich, Dodd, Biden, Giuliani, Huckabee, Brown, Tancredo, and Romney. (Did I leave anyone out?) Sure, Hillary's closer in numbers to Obama than sideshows like Giuliani ever came to McCain, but that's academic. The result is the same: she cannot win the nomination.

Okay, well, sure, she could, if the superdelegates got together and decided to thwart the expressed will of the voters. But let's take a look at the trend. Since Super Tuesday, Obama has won more than twice as many superdelegates as Clinton. The tide is not in her favor. Any way you want to slice this, by any metric, Hillary has lost and cannot win.

Hillary seems to think that the fact that she is "close" (she trails by 700,000 votes and nearly 200 pledged delegates) entitles her to...well, I'm not sure what, exactly. The nomination? John Kerry was "close" to Bush in 2004, but what did that matter? Second place is second place.

Bill Clinton called the media coverage of Obama's anti-war position "the biggest fairy tale I've ever heard." That must mean he'd never heard Hillary's tale of landing in Bosnia under sniper-fire. Meantime, following the Reverend Wright dust-up, Gallup discovers that Obama leads Clinton nationally by a margin-of-error-proof 10%.

Why is anyone still supporting her? She invented the Bosnia story out of whole cloth -- and repeated it on multiple occasions -- to buttress the myth that she has significant foreign policy experience. As one wag put it, "Saying that Hillary has Executive Branch experience is like saying Yoko Ono was a Beatle." She either has a poor memory, is delusional, or is mendacity incarnate. Which of these qualities becomes a president?

Barack Obama was a relative newcomer on the national stage; he came from more than 20 percentage points behind to overcome and surpass a candidate who truly was inevitable, and we are supposed to believe that she's the one with superior judgment and administrative capacity? Did I mention that her campaign has $8.7 million in unpaid bills? I don't understand. What do people see in her?

Last week it was reported that 28% of Clinton supporters said they would vote for McCain instead if when Obama gets the nomination. This is, I think, more than coincidentally close to the 27% threshhold of the Theory of Crazification. I know; in the past, I myself have entertained the thought -- and may even have spoken aloud the threat -- of voting for McCain if Hillary is the nominee. But then I thought about it. I thought about who would get to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court. I thought about who would appoint the next Attorney General while we have innocent people languishing in undisclosed locations around the world. I thought about the war in Iraq. I thought about universal healthcare and the housing crisis and the environment and civil rights and tax cuts.

And so, while I may believe that Hillary deserves to lose, I believe America does not. America needs to win. America needs to firmly reject the Bush Administration and its supporters and apologists and reclaim its moral standing in the world.

All things considered, Hillary Clinton would probably make a good president. Certainly a better one than John McCain. But Barack Obama is a better choice yet; and the voters have already chosen him. It's time for Senator Clinton to step aside and support the people's decision.

11 comments:

DJRainDog said...

All this in-fighting is really making the Dems look BAD. I mean, yes, I will vote for whoever is pledging not to continue down the path to hell on which Bush has led the country for the last 8 years. But will the rest of America? Unfortunately, I fear it's going to get worse before it gets better...And that's making me wish all those crazy folk who believe in the rapture were at least partially right.

Jeff said...

Worse yet, Hillary has been blatantly lying to local media venues in the last couple of days, telling them that Obama is trying to get her to drop out and prevent other states from voting.

I've never seen that Theory of Crazification before. I love it.

David said...

Amen, and thank you. I've intended to blog just such a post, but you said it better than I could've.

N. English said...

Check out the article by Christopher Hitchens at Slate...

http://www.slate.com/id/2187780/

Anonymous said...

Actually, I'm more interested in your response to THIS Hitchens article:

http://www.slate.com/id/2187277/

tully said...

Mendacity!

Big Daddy would call it "Bull!"

Andy said...

Oh...LC, it's not a good omen for your conservative credentials that you are picking up on my Tennessee Williams references.

Luke: I think Hitchens is a very talented writer, but he's so unhinged when it comes to matters of faith that I really don't think it's worth the time to engage him, even indirectly, on the subject.

Anonymous said...

It seems to me that Senator Clinton's campaign is beginning to acquire that rather unattractive desparation that one can recognize in a pick up bar close to closing time. Unfortunately, it appears that the good senator never learned the lesson that sometimes it is perhaps better to leave at the appropriate time, retain some sense of dignity and self-worth, and try again or find something better suited to one's temperament and talents.

Sigh...

BJ

tully said...

"Oh...LC, it's not a good omen for your conservative credentials that you are picking up on my Tennessee Williams references."

The real casualties here would be my heterosexual credentials. Luckily, I haven't credentials of any sexual orientation to lose!

You may as well forget associating me with "conservatism". It's not that I'm fleeing from the label like some 'tweeny moderate, but that I don't have a systematic enough knowledge of ethics to concern myself with politics at this point. Rest assured, I opine that McCain better knows how to keep us safe (happy) and prevent poverty (provide happiness?). On the other hand, he seems to separate morality from politics (basing it on separating church and state), and I hope this doesn't mean he thinks ethics and politics are separate affairs. The imperative to avoid "legislating morality" is based on the fallibility of certain sources of morality- I say that nothing but morality (ethics) can be legislated.

Wouldn't you say, after all, that politics can be nothing other than "the science of living a good life" on a societal scale and by governmental means? What other purpose can government have than the happiness of the state?

tully said...

P.S. Socrates would vote for McCain

(;

DJRainDog said...

Utter nonsense, as usual, l-c. Socrates would drink his hemlock, rather than live in such a pathetic state as America has become.