The reaction brewing to Hillary’s win in New Hampshire strikes me as, at once, predictable and absurd. The polls were rigged. The Bradley effect. No, John Judis nailed it. New Hampshire Polling Read the full article, but essentially he says that women changed their vote at the last minute. I know what follows is all anecdotal and all about me, but what happened to me matches his thesis exactly. More below
For most of this race I have been leaning Edwards, but have been happy to support any of the three as president. I worried over the press’s post-Iowa coronation of Obama since I think a long campaign is the only way we are really going to know how these candidates will hold up in the general election campaign. I was looking forward to watching the process force Obama to sharpen his positions, leaven his message of unity with a recognition that you can’t tango alone. I have been disturbed about the votes Obama missed, Iran, and the ones he took, Patriot Act, Iraq war funding, and his support of Liebermann and criticizing trial lawyers. I’ve worried that he manages to avoid hard votes. I don’t like his health plan and I don’t like his defensiveness around his health plan. What I saw was a candidate more concerned with crafting a message of unity than dealing with the fractured politics of Washington. But he’s smart, he’s chosen good people as advisors. I love to listen to him and think the American people do too. He could go over the head of the Republican political machine and dance with the country in a way we haven’t seen since Kennedy.
I was looking forward to the campaign forcing Clinton to admit that her vote for Liebermann’s Iran bill was an opportunistic mistake (well, I didn’t really think she was going to admit that, I just hoped it would), as well as be more forthcoming about the pressures that caused her to vote for the Iraq war (as it is clear that she has decided not to say she regrets it or would do it differently.) I’ve been wondering when she’d learn she needed to send Bill back home and campaign on her own. I understand that people love him, but I think on balance the country is tired of him. He should stay home and raise funds. I thought her television tone was almost always wrong, always stern, never soft. I can’t stand her political advisors, but like her substantive advisors. She knows how power will have to be used to get results.
As for Edwards, I principally just like watching Elisabeth operate and still do. Boy, do I ever wish she were running. I like his domestic proposals. I like that he came clean about his Iraq vote. I think he’s got the most concrete domestic proposals, though thin on foreign policy. I like his anti-corporatist message, although I think he’s a little more strident than the nation will be able to handle. Principally I didn’t really think he was going to win and supporting him gave me more time to make up my mind between Obama and Clinton. If his strategy is to keep in the race long enough to force some of his domestic proposals on the other candidates, that’s good too.
All of this until Saturday night.
I watched the debate on Saturday night and thought Clinton has clearly won. She was specific, struck back when attacked, and responded effectively to the press’s efforts to bait her. Obama said almost nothing, except for his almost surly retort to her joke about being likeable. I thought maybe he was just exhausted. Edwards looked less than gracious when he responded to Clinton’s offer of support in his tussle with Obama’s criticism of Edwards’s supporters. He spurned it and turned it into an attack on Clinton for representing the status quo. He apparently got points for the pivot, but I thought he looked petty. His message was fine, but not the timing. By the end of the evening it really did look like three guys ganging up which she handled with grace and precision.
But the post-debate press coverage infuriated me. Hillary’s flair of passion at the debate was portrayed as a weakness even though Obama had recently received fulsome praise for fighting back. Then came the hysterical press cynicism around her show of emotion when she talked about how personally she felt about what was happening to the country; the Obama camp complaint that she didn’t "cry about Katrina;" Edwards’s gratuitous comments that a Commander-in-Chief has to be steady shot me out of his camp like a canon.
So for Tuesday night, had I been a New Hampshire voter, I would have been Clinton supporter. I wouldn’t have stayed there long, but I would have voted in that primary for her. Now I’m back on the fence, if not back in Edwards’s camp, still wanting there to be a campaign.
But I do worry about the reaction that seems to be building that the Clintons are racists or are subtly authorizing their surrogates to use race to divide. In the thrust of a campaign, especially where Obama’s supporters have just received validation of the fact that their candidate might really win, it is natural to worry that any criticism of their candidate holds a tinge of racism. I certainly reacted that way when I saw Clinton under a sexist attack and I wasn’t even her supporter. But I didn’t think Obama was sexist and I would be angry if people said he was. There is no evidence for the charge that Clinton is racist or encouraging the use of this theme. Doing so would be counterintuitive to her life. For the first time in our history we get to have a choice of either an African American or a woman. The debate can’t become a battle over which is worse, racism or sexism, It needs to be about who has the best ideas and who can help the American people learn to accept those ideas, not about what the press says unnamed backers of either candidate say behind the scenes. Clinton and Obama and Edwards need to step up and calm this down before it creates a fracture in our party.