There's a classic saying among Democrats. I know I've seen it on a Kossack sig line (sorry I can't remember whose!) and it would make a great - albeit long - bumper sticker:
If you want the country to move forward, put it in "D." If you want to go backward, put it in "R."
But there's another option on our national stick shift, and it's one that too many Democrats still seem eager to take on this eve of our first de facto national primary:
If you want to leave the car in neutral, put it in "N." Unfortunately, that's what a vote for Hillary Clinton means on the eve of this most important day of the 2008 presidential primary season.
More below the flip ...
Despite Senator Clinton's great accomplishments and intellect and the fact that yes, she would make history as the first woman president, nominating Clinton would be a ticket to leaving our nation in neutral. I do believe she could win, but by a small margin that would leave our nation divided. She'd drive a high Republican turnout among a dispirited GOP electorate that's otherwise uninterested in its candidates. She'd encourage one or more third-party candidacies that would split the vote and make a mandate - never mind a working majority - less likely.
I live in Boise, where more than 14,000 people packed an arena to hear Barack Obama early Saturday morning, and several thousand more were turned away. This is in one of the reddest of the red states - a state where only 5,000 people took part in the Democratic caucuses statewide in 2004 (and that was a new record). Tomorrow, we expect that many people to show up at the Boise-area Ada County caucuses alone.
And it's all because of Obama. The day before his visit, Sen. Maria Cantwell came here in a last-ditch attempt to rally Clinton support. About 50 people showed up, and perhaps a third of us were there to be polite. (I personally just wanted to pay my respects to Sen. Cantwell for her work against drilling in the Alaskan Arctic.) The fact is, as we all know, Obama has paid attention to all 50 states, while Clinton has been playing a lame game of catch-up these past few weeks.
But the real bottom line behind Barack Obama's appeal is this: People are sick of the same old s---. And this doesn't just mean the last seven years of GWB. It also means the eight years before that - of the intense partisan rancor and gridlock we've lived with now for more than a decade-and-a-half and, in some ways, since the 1960s. This is why we need a president who is too young to have personally had a stake in the 1960s, and who can forge a working bipartisan majority to break the gridlock and get the country out of the rut we've been in since Vietnam and Watergate, and since the Kennedys and MLK were killed. It won't happen with either Hillary Clinton or John McCain. As Andrew Sullivan and others have pointed out, both are simply too symbolic of the "culture wars" we've been fighting for the past 40 freakin' years.
Then there's the Clinton camp's legendary nastiness. Within hours of Obama's Boise rally, the Clintonian kneecappers were at work, cherry-picking a statement Obama had made in Boise about supporting hunters' rights and drawing attention to a 12-year-old questionnaire wherein Obama expressed support for stricter limits on handguns. Hey, why use a rifle when a blunderbuss will do?
Although the Clinton campaign is using electability as a top theme in its closing arguments for Super Tuesday, recent polls demonstrate that Obama has a bigger lead than she does over either likely GOP rival. As Chris Cillizza wrote at The Washington Post this morning, "Closing the campaign - or at least this first phase of it -- on electability shows that the Clinton campaign believes it is a winning message for her. But is it? A look back at exit polling done in the states that have voted to date suggest it may not be."
With the crowds and passion he's been inspiring in all 50 states, Barack Obama has the potential to win by a comfortable margin in November. He has the potential to put the 1960s behind us and to quiet - if not silence - the GOP noise machine and its media allies that have a stake in keeping us pissed off.
The way forward is clear indeed. Don't leave the country in "N." Put it in "D."