John McQuaid

Hilary Rosen, a Hillary Clinton supporter, rightly identifies the broader problem with the Clinton campaign’s post-endgame maneuvering – its nature as a pure power play:

She had an opportunity to soar and unite. She had a chance to surprise her party and the nation after the day-long denials about expecting any concession and send Obama off on the campaign trail of the general election with the best possible platform. I wrote before how she had a chance for her “Al Gore moment.” And if she had done so, the whole country ALL would be talking today about how great she is and give her her due.

Instead she left her supporters empty, Obama’s angry, and party leaders trashing her. She said she was stepping back to think about her options. She is waiting to figure out how she would “use” her 18 million voters.

But not my vote. I will enthusiastically support Barack Obama’s campaign. Because I am not a bargaining chip. I am a Democrat.

The Clinton campaign has avidly sought any political advantage at its disposal, no matter what moral compromises were involved. The philosophy is, the ends (electing Clinton) justify the means (hurting the certain nominee, and the party). No doubt, Clinton justified this to herself and her close supporters by saying that Obama couldn’t win the presidency, so the party had to be saved from itself. But that’s a dubious and self-serving judgment. In other words, the ends justify the means.

But American political parties are organized around causes and issues first, individual personalities second. We’re not in Cuba or Peronist Argentina. FDR was FDR because of what he did, not who he was. I’d wager that the vast majority of those “18 million” voters were expressing support not for Hillary, but for what they think she represents: mainly, the traditional Democratic support for the little guy in tough, uncertain economic times. The notion that Obama cannot represent them is absurd. And as Rosen notes, the attempt to exploit and leverage that support in a power play that would damage Obama whether it succeeds or fails is an insult to those voters.

Kudos to Barack Obama for running a great, and ultimately successful, campaign for the Democratic nomination. It’s an historic moment, and an exciting one.

What of Hillary? Of course, she is trying to leverage her still-considerable support to muscle the Obama campaign for the vice presidential slot, or … something. It’s not really clear what she wants, other than to wield that power and not disappear. So there is some fragile rationale for playing the game she is playing. But going forward, with Obama having clinched the nomination and with no more primaries to generate positive news for her, both the political terrain and media perceptions will turn sharply against continued intransigence. She will look ever more absurd and out of touch with reality. In a word, pathetic. And Hillary doesn’t want that.

The unity ticket probably would be an effective way to pull the party together and win votes in November. But I don’t see how it could work in practice once an Obama administration got underway.

Option one: Hillary would be marginalized and isolated and spend most of her time abroad at funerals. She wouldn’t accept this and would demand a piece of the pie as the price of being on the ticket, which means…

Option two: Hillary would be given some kind of political/policy portfolio, as she was with health care reform, or even broader powers as in the Cheney vice presidency. But Obama would have to be crazy to accede to the creation of a rival power center in the White House by installing someone with an outsized sense of entitlement, her own electoral constituency, die-hard loyalists and assorted hangers-on, among them an ex-president with a penchant for speaking his mind no matter what his handlers tell him.

Finally, a good night for Barack Obama. If you follow politics, listening to the same story day after day, accompanied by the increasingly over-the-top antics of the Clinton campaign (red-faced Bill! gas tax pander! race card! cojones! whiskey shots! nuclear option!) had become completely maddening. After all, we’ve already had our intelligence insulted by our political leaders on a daily basis for 8 years.

Worst of all were the endless, half-assed demographic analyses generated by the Clinton-Obama working class white voters vs. black voters conundrum. Virtually all of those, whether conducted with hand-wringing by Democrats or with glee by Republicans, were basically useless in anticipating the performance of the Democratic coalition in the fall or beyond. An interesting exercise, yes, with some possibly serious political implications. But as a crystal ball, specious.