I'm not against Hillary. In fact, in the past three weeks I have found myself more and more in favor of her candidacy. I've thought more and more about how she shines, compared to the other candidates in the race. They all have their strong points, of course, and I would be quite happy with Obama, but Hillary pulled ahead in my head/heart a couple of weeks ago.
"Why," I've been asking myself, "don't other people see what I am seeing? Why are the Dems I know who should like her so reluctant to get in her camp?"
I think that I have figured it out.
Hillary isn't Dukasis, Gore or Kerry, but she is the wonk among the three leading Democratic candidates. I think that my friend who have tended towards wonks in the past a bit distrustful of those urges today. That's a small part of it. Despite Obama's record (i.e. Harvard Law, Harvard Law Review, state legislator, community organizer), his appeal is his charisma and his public speaking ability. Like Bill Clinton, the fact that he is capable of the wonk stuff, it's not part of his public persona.
Yeah, that's part of it. But that's not the big thing.
It think that it is fear of losing. We somehow lost to that idiot in 2000. And then, we lost again in 2004. We will never feel really confident that we will win in 2008, so we are always concerned about losing. And we don't want to lose with Hillary.
We can all imagine how we will lose with her. We already know the attacks. We can hear the pundits voice them ad nauseam. We've been hearing them for 15 years, right? We can see it coming.
Not that we know it will happen. But if it does happen, we know exactly how it will happen.
That is simply not the case with Obama. Sure, we could lose with him, but we don't know how it might happen. It could be the coke. Or the lack of international experience. Or the lack of policy particulars. Or racism. Or whatever. We are smart and can think up reasons why he could lose, too. But we can't picture it as easily. We he to lose, the details would be new.
My friends don't want to lose with Hillary because they'll always be kicking themselves, saying "We should have seen it coming. We knew all along exactly what they would do and we picked her anyway. We are idiots."
And given how appealing each candidate is, though in quite different ways, they want to minimize the chance of feeling like an idiot in November.
Now, I'm not saying that that's not a good enough reason to break a tie. I leave it as a exercise for the reader to think about that, and to figure out if it's being used as a tie-breaker or being used to pull out Obama from behind. I'm just saying that we should confront it consciously.
Update: The analysis of the day seems to be that Hillary benefitted from some backlash against the anti-Hillary onslaught. I don't know if this mediates the fear of losing with her or not, but the anti-Hillary media are definitely a factor in the thinking of any thoughtful Democratic primary voter.
Update: I didn't want to get into the technical term "loss aversion" before, but I'll mention it now. There was an OpEd piece by Michael Shermer in the LA Times on Sunday that explains what "loss adversion" is in non-political terms. I think that that explains what is going here.