For a time it was considered an act of heresy to even suggest that running a campaign purely on the basis of when you "came to Obama" might not hold up over the long haul. (And that's not to say that running the campaign on "the sisterhood of the traveling pantsuit" would have been any more successful ---the same problems existed for Clinton.) Democrats decided to take their shoe-in and turn it into a nail biter because they wanted a huge symbolic victory for either African Americans or women. I took pride in that --- it's a bold gamble. But I've never thought there wasn't a cost.
And I always felt that Democrats should have run hard against conservatism itself so that a majority of voters would reject the GOP brand no matter who was wearing it. Instead we saw airy campaigns rife with symbols of liberal progress and the promise of some new post partisan agreement that only one side had signed on to. Indeed, they have all spent way too much time for the last year extolling the other side, genuflecting to their icons and pretending that there was some national consensus that everyone wanted Democrats to stop their vicious partisanship --- when they hadn't lifted a finger. It's been maddening to watch.
Wrong. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been in the cross-hairs of the Republican Party for most of her adult life. She’s the most famous Democrat in the world! She couldn’t run a "post-partisan" campaign if she wanted to. That’s Obama’s contribution to the annals of Democratic stupidity.
Hillary did get tired of being called a racist by the Obama campaign and a bitch by the media, and she fought back with a little female solidarity. Barack might now be finding that useful had he been self-confident enough to put her on the ticket.
No comments:
Post a Comment