I'm writing this before the results from Ohio and Texas are known. And in an
election year where events have been brutally unkind to predictions, it
seems folly to pronounce Hillary Clinton a dead woman walking, but I'm going
to do it anyway. After all, the great difference between pundits and
coroners is that pundits don't need to wait for actual death to commence the
autopsy.
Whatever the results of Gotterdammerung Tuesday are, it seems clear that
Clinton won't be the Democratic nominee. Indeed, the only way for her to win
is for Barack Obama to lose by his own hand. Like some invulnerable demigod
who can only be destroyed by his own hubris, Obama is now mathematically and
politically immune to Clinton's attacks. She is now the true candidate of
hope.
That's ironic, given that Clinton's whole campaign has been based on the
premise that she is the careful, strategy-obsessed candidate. From
health-care policy to hairdo, Hillary is a planner. As I've said before, her
idea of spontaneity is to leap from her prepared text to her prepared index
cards.
Hence the glorious failure that she and her strategists neglected to imagine
they'd even need a strategy after Super Tuesday.
And there were other more obvious mistakes. In the mother-of-all-change
elections, the Clinton team opted to make her campaign about "experience"
and about veering "back to the future," in Bill Clinton's words. Or were
those Hillary's words? Is there a difference? Confusion on this point is
understandable given that the ex-president not only speaks as if a vote for
Hillary is a vote for him, but also seems to think that voters are actually
voting for him.
The decision to use Bill as a surrogate - the ultimate Hillary in a pantsuit
- has been hotly debated for months. The arguments in favor (he's popular
with the base, he gets enormous media attention, he's an indefatigable
campaigner) and the arguments against (he's controversial, he puts the
campaign "off message," his narcissism is all-consuming, etc.) all seem to
have missed the larger point. By dragooning Bill into the race - or, more
accurately, by failing to prevent him from leaping into it - the Clinton
team reinforced the perception that Hillary is the closest thing to an
incumbent the Democrats have.
This is not the year for incumbents. This is not the year for a candidacy
whose central argument amounts to "it's my turn."
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