What's Next? A Call for a Lynching?
These days it's hard to tell which is more of a mess: the Clinton campaign or Hillary Clinton herself. First she compares her efforts to seat Florida and Michigan delegations to the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, the struggle against a despot in Zimbabwe, and the Democrats' failed efforts to recount votes in Florida in 2000.
Then, she invokes the assassination of Robert Kennedy as a reason that she should continue her campaign. Does she know something we don't know?
The New Republic's Ben Smith notes that Clinton had invoked RFK's assassination previously, in a March 6 interview with Time magazine.
CQ Politics' David Nather suggests that this was not the way to be considered for the vice presidential slot in an Obama general election campaign.
Clinton later issued a halfhearted apology, saying that she regretted that anyone found her remarks offensive, particularly the Kennedy family. She pointedly did not mention Barack Obama.
Clinton's rhetoric concerning her efforts to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates was widely regarded as ironic — both because she (and Obama) had agreed not to campaign in either state after the DNC sanctioned them for holding their primaries too early, and because her position devalued the votes of many who legitimately supported Obama, including a large percentage of African Americans.
As Jonathan Chait wrote in The New Republic:
Obama not campaigning, organizing, or advertizing in those states hurt him, and helped the more familiar candidate in Clinton. She decided to campaign to change the rules only after it became her interest to do so.
This gambit by Clinton is simply an attempt to steal the nomination. It's obviously not going to work, because Democratic superdelegates don't want to commit suicide. But this episode is very revealing about Clinton's character. I try not to make moralistic characterological judgments about politicians, because all politicians compromise their ideals in the pursuit of power. There are no angels in this business. Clinton's gambit, however, truly is breathtaking.
If she's consciously lying, it's a shockingly cynical move. I don't think she's lying. I think she's so convinced of her own morality and historical importance that she can whip herself into a moralistic fervor to support nearly any position that might benefit her, however crass and sleazy. It's not just that she's convinced herself it's okay to try to steal the nomination, she has also appropriated the most sacred legacies of liberalism for her effort to do so. She is proving herself temperamentally unfit for the presidency.
And if there was any doubt of her temperamental unfitness, today's invocation of the specter of assassination should have dispelled them.
- Login to post comments
Historical Analogy Doesn't Hold; Clinton Blames Obama
Clinton claimed she referenced Robert Kennedy's assassination because it represented a primary that was decided late. In fact, as The New Republic's Marty Peretz notes, despite Kennedy's narrow victory in California in 1968, Hubert Humphrey had more delegates before and after the assassination, and was the eventual nominee.
[T]he one and only reason for Hillary to allude Kennedy's death was to raise the specter of Obama's death. Like reminding us that her support came from hard-working white Americans. And his from shiftless and lazy black Americans, no doubt.
Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign hasn't addressed that the remark came in the context of a campaign in which there have already been threats against Obama, and Hillary has not personally apologized to him. Instead, Bush- and Rove-like, they want to blame the Obama campaign for trying to "take these words out of context," and for distributing Keith Olbermann's commentary from May 23.
Clinton Remark Renews Discussion of Obama Safety Concerns
The NY Times notes that Clinton's comments "touched on one of the most sensitive aspects of the current presidential campaign — concern for Mr. Obama’s safety."
Concerns about Mr. Obama’s safety led the Secret Service to give him protection last May, before it was afforded to any other presidential candidate, although Mrs. Clinton had protection, too, in her capacity as a former first lady. Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, voiced concerns about his safety before he was elected to the Senate, and some black voters have even said such fears weighed on their decision of whether to vote for him.
It was against that backdrop that Mrs. Clinton’s mentioning the Kennedy assassination in the same breath as her own political fate struck some as going too far. Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, an uncommitted superdelegate, said through a spokeswoman that the comments were “beyond the pale.”