Go Already!
by
Jonathan ChaitHillary Clinton, fratricidal maniac.Post Date Thursday, March 06, 2008
The morning after Tuesday's primaries, Hillary Clinton's campaign
released a memo titled "The Path to the Presidency." I eagerly dug into
the paper, figuring it would explain how Clinton would obtain the
Democratic nomination despite an enormous deficit in delegates.
Instead, the memo offered a series of arguments as to why Clinton
should run against John McCain--i.e., "Hillary is seen as the one who
can get the job done"--but nothing about how she actually could. Is she
planning a third-party run? Does she think Obama is going to die? The
memo does not say.
The reason it doesn't say is that Clinton's path
to the nomination is pretty repulsive. She isn't going to win at the
polls. Barack Obama has a lead of 144 pledged delegates. That may not
sound like a lot in a 4,000-delegate race, but it is. Clinton's Ohio
win reduced that total by only nine. She would need 15 more Ohios to
pull even with Obama. She isn't going to do much to dent, let alone
eliminate, his lead.
That
means, as we all have grown tired of hearing, that she would need to
win with superdelegates. But, with most superdelegates already
committed, Clinton would need to capture the remaining ones by a margin
of better than two to one. And superdelegates are going to be extremely
reluctant to overturn an elected delegate lead the size of Obama's. The
only way to lessen that reluctance would be to destroy Obama's general
election viability, so that superdelegates had no choice but to hand
the nomination to her. Hence her flurry of attacks, her oddly qualified
response as to whether Obama is a Muslim ("not as far as I know"), her
repeated suggestions that John McCain is more qualified.
Clinton's justification for this strategy
is that she needs to toughen up Obama for the general election-if he
can't handle her attacks, he'll never stand up to the vast right-wing
conspiracy. Without her hazing, warns the Clinton memo, "Democrats may
have a nominee who will be a lightening rod of controversy." So
Clinton's offensive against the likely nominee is really an act of
selflessness. And here I was thinking she was maniacally pursuing her
slim thread of a chance, not caring--or possibly even hoping,
with an eye toward 2012-that she would destroy Obama's chances of
defeating McCain in the process. I feel ashamed for having suspected
her motives.
Still,
there are a few flaws in Clinton's trial-by-smear method. The first is
that her attacks on Obama are not a fair proxy for what he'd endure in
the general election, because attacks are harder to refute when they
come from within one's own party. Indeed, Clinton is saying almost
exactly the same things about Obama that McCain is: He's inexperienced,
lacking in substance, unequipped to handle foreign policy. As The Washington Monthly's
Christina Larson has pointed out, in recent weeks the nightly newscasts
have consisted of Clinton attacking Obama, McCain attacking Obama, and
then Obama trying to defend himself and still get out his own message.
If Obama's the nominee, he won't have a high-profile Democrat
validating McCain's message every day.
Second,
Obama can't "test" Clinton the way she can test him. While she likes to
claim that she beat the Republican attack machine, it's more accurate
to say that she survived with heavy damage. Clinton is a wildly
polarizing figure, with disapproval ratings at or near 50 percent. But,
because she earned the intense loyalty of core Democratic partisans,
Obama has to tread gingerly around her vulnerabilities. There is a big
bundle of ethical issues from the 1990s that Obama has not raised
because he can't associate himself with what partisan Democrats (but
not Republicans or swing voters) regard as a pure GOP witch hunt.
What's
more, Clinton has benefited from a favorable gender dynamic that won't
exist in the fall. (In the Democratic primary, female voters have
outnumbered males by nearly three to two.) Clinton's claim to being a
tough, tested potential commander-in-chief has gone almost
unchallenged. Obama could reply that being First Lady doesn't qualify
you to serve as commander-in-chief, but he won't quite say that,
because feminists are an important chunk of the Democratic electorate.
John McCain wouldn't be so reluctant.
Third,
negative campaigning is a negative-sum activity. Both the attacker and
the attackee tend to see their popularity drop. Usually, the victim's
popularity drops farther than the perpetrator's, which is why negative
campaigning works. But it doesn't work so well in primaries, where the
winner has to go on to another election.
Clinton's
path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an
eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the
first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile
cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a
contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results
at the polls. The plan may also involve trying to seat the Michigan and
Florida delegations, after having explicitly agreed that the results
would not count toward delegate totals. Oh, and her campaign has
periodically hinted that some of Obama's elected delegates
might break off and support her. I don't think she'd be in a position
to defeat Hitler's dog in November, let alone a popular war hero.
Some
Clinton supporters, like my friend (and historian) David Greenberg,
have been assuring us that lengthy primary fights go on all the time
and that the winner doesn't necessarily suffer a mortal wound in the
process. But Clinton's kamikaze mission is likely to be unusually
damaging. Not only is the opportunity cost--to wrap up the nomination,
and spend John McCain into the ground for four months--uniquely high,
but the venue could not be less convenient. Pennsylvania is a swing
state that Democrats will almost certainly need to win in November, and
Clinton will spend seven weeks and millions of dollars there making the
case that Obama is unfit to set foot in the White House. You couldn't
create a more damaging scenario if you tried.
Imagine in 2000, or 2004, that George W. Bush faced a primary fight that came down to Florida (his
November must-win state). Imagine his opponent decided to spend seven
weeks pounding home the theme that Bush had a dangerous plan to
privatize Social Security. Would this have improved Bush's chances of
defeating the Democrats? Would his party have stood for it?
Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic.