DETROIT -- She is a woman. She is a white woman. She is a manly white woman. In her desperate quest for the presidency, Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign ramped up gender, race and machismo as the factors she wants the Democrats to consider in selecting the party's nominee.
Watching Clinton's campaign melting is an ugly sight. Her ruthless tactics are deplorable and divisive, not just for the party, but for the nation as well. As the reality of her failure sets in, and with Sen. Barack Obama now snatching the lead among superdelegates, Clinton has sounded slightly more conciliatory, but only after firing off a few more vile volleys at her rival.
After Obama pulled off an impressive victory in the North Carolina primary and Clinton eked out a narrow victory in Indiana -- with Rush Limbaugh's "ditto heads" providing the margin of her victory at his urging -- Clinton provided post-election analysis that certainly pleased Rush and his right-wing chorus.
Clinton told USA Today that, in spite of Obama's lead in the popular vote and number of state victories, she has "a much broader base to build a winning coalition." If she left it at that, her remarks could be written off as innocuous political spin.
But then Clinton plunged into a graceless, destructive message that contained disturbing class and racial overtones. She cited and twisted an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There is a pattern emerging here."
The pattern is Clinton's willingness to say just about anything to advance her bleak chances of snaring the nomination from Obama. And if that means exploiting racial divisions, so be it. Sen. Clinton is essentially saying the black guy can't win and only she can.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote, "The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It's a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years."
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who is black and a longtime Hillary supporter, told New York's Daily News, "I can't believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb."
Clinton's poisonous rhetoric magnifies the racial fault lines in American politics and she deliberately attempts to wreck any hopes Obama, the Democrats' likely nominee, has of winning in November. She is wallowing in the swamp mud of racial politics and social regression.
Richard Nixon used code words to disguise his race baiting -- his "Southern strategy," his support for "states' rights" and "law and order." George H.W. Bush used the Willie Horton ad -- a TV spot with the face of a black man convicted of raping and killing a white woman while on parole -- in a less subtle racially divisive message.
Clinton doesn't bother with code words or unspoken messages. She's more like the late Alabama governor George Wallace when he was on the presidential stump. Wallace would say in effect, "I'm the white guy and all you white guys should vote for me." Clinton's racial argument insults white voters, suggesting they are unwilling to give a black candidate a chance.
Clinton still has substantial support from women voters, but her campaign tactics have eroded even that support. She still has feminists like Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood, who told the AP as Clinton's campaign sinks, "We are in danger of never having another campaign election where people will say women can determine the outcome."
Balderdash!
Many feminists still don't grasp the notion that many voters reject Clinton, not because she is a woman, but because they don't like her positions and don't trust her. Ellen Bravo, a feminist author and advocate for working women, is supporting Obama.
She told the AP she faults Clinton's vote to support the war in Iraq and believes Obama is more committed to grassroots political movements. Bravo felt the sting of pro-Clinton feminists.
"I felt it was an ultimatum -- vote for Hillary Clinton or you're betraying the women's movement," Bravo said. She added that the hamhanded tactics don't work.
"It's very self-defeating and alienating, particularity younger women who, regardless of who they support, don't like to be told 'Do this, Do that.'"
Ariel Garfinkel, a student at Mount Holyoke College, wrote in a political blog that she and many other young feminists were offended by Clinton's attempt to capitalize on racial divisions.
"The pattern of old-style politics and adherence to un-feminist values," Garfinkel argued, "is part and parcel of the campaign Hillary Clinton has run. In this race, Barack Obama is the true feminist."
Many of Hillary's supporters make repeated and often crude references to her having more testosterone than Obama, claiming she is tougher, manlier. She buttresses that position with the bellicose words she uses about the U.S. role in the world.
In his new book, "Wiser in Battle," Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former U.S. military commander in Iraq, says the war in Iraq is "a nightmare with no end in sight." Sanchez describes a teleconference with military leaders and President George W. Bush during the Battle of Fallujah in 2004.
Sanchez writes Bush bellowed, "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell!" After the pep rally, Bush, as is his custom, probably returned to playing video games.
We need a president with more brains and less machismo. Clinton's ploy to demonstrate that she's tougher than any of the boys has backfired.
She might have done better offering a gentler, more feminine hand to the world instead of playing the thug and pledging to "obliterate" Iran.
Clinton has succeeded in positioning herself as the champion of the blue-collar worker, while trying to convince people Obama is somehow an elite child of privilege. Even by Clinton standards, that is a monumental deception.
In Clinton's standard stump speech, she calls for more financial help for college students. It's troubling that she never mentions that she was fortunate to have a relatively well-to-do father who paid for her pricey tuition at Wellesley College and Yale Law School.
She never had to take out a college loan or work summer jobs to pay for college as Obama did. Yet Clinton tries to paint Obama -- who spent most of his life in a single-parent, financially struggling household -- as out of touch with "hardworking Americans."
Clinton's own money has kept her campaign alive. In recent weeks, she's lent $6.4 million to her campaign as she struggles to find some way to hold on to hope of winning the nomination.
As she said last week, "I'm staying in this race until there's a nominee."
I take her at her word and expect she will look for any way to wrestle the nomination from Obama. She may try to further rip the party apart by pressing to change the rules and permit the seating of the unsanctioned Florida and Michigan delegations.
And she may look for new ways to chip at Obama. The Clintons, once so confident of a grand restoration, are in foul moods facing the prospect of defeat.
Hillary's campaign -- rooted in her name, money and influence and an arrogant sense of entitlement -- failed to roll over Obama as she expected. Who knows how the drama will end?
Clinton as a vice presidential candidate is still a possibility. Dick Cheney has certainly inflated the importance of the office, and Clinton hardly wants to return to the Senate, where so many of her colleagues, who know her so well, support Obama.
But Clinton's campaign-trail behavior is diminishing her chances for a place on the ticket. One thing is certain: Hillary Clinton will not, as Dylan Thomas wrote, "go gentle into that good night."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | May 13 2008 |