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Fratricidal Maniac

Submitted by Howie on Sun, 03/09/2008 - 09:55

The day after the March 4 primaries in Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island, the Clinton campaign issued a memo titled "The Path to the Presidency." But rather than explaining how Hillary would win the nomination, the memo listed a series of arguments as to why she should run against John McCain.

The reason there's nothing about her path to the nomination, The New Republic's Jonathan Chait writes, is that "Clinton's path to the nomination is pretty repulsive."

She isn't going to win at the polls.... 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.

Superdelegates, Chait notes, are understandably reluctant to overturn Obama's lead in elected delegates.

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 justifies her strategy by claiming that she's toughening up Obama for right-wing attacks he might face in the general election. Chait refutes this as follows:

  • Clinton's attacks on Obama are "not a fair proxy" for Republican attacks. She's saying the same things about Obama that John McCain is. "If Obama's the nominee, he won't have a high-profile Democrat validating McCain's message every day," Chat observes.
  • Clinton likes to say that she beat the Republican attack machine. Chait suggests "it's more accurate to say that she survived with heavy damage." Moreover, Obama can't bring up Clinton controversies from the 90s that many Democrats regard as a "GOP witch hunt."
  • Negative campaigning damages both attacker and target. The attacker hopes that the target's popularity drops faster than the attacker. The problem in primaries, Chait notes, is that one of the two still has to go on to another election contest.

Read the whole story here.