I support Obama. I think his speech this week on race was the finest piece of political discourse this nation has seen in years. I hope he weathers the storm, wins the nomination and the fall election. In short, I hope this diary turns out to be a futile exercise in mental masturbation.
Nevertheless, it would be unwise and imprudent to discount completely the notion that he could be in some deep trouble. A continued slide in the polls against McCain, a revelation that he was present at one of Wright's controversial sermons or something new and unexpected could undermine his viability in the fall. This is the inherent problem with movement candidacies; without the candidate, the movement ends. My core thesis here is that the movement must be kept going, even if the candidacy cannot.
Hence, I believe it is worth a bit of bandwidth to ponder what can be done if his campaign becomes damaged beyond the point of repair. This is not about delegate math except for the fact that superdelegates will defect from and never go for a candidate who is deemed in their eyes to be a flawed candidate in the fall. That point, left unanswered, opens the door to a Clinton nomination, which has been her strategy since the cloak of inevitability was peeled off of her earlier in the year.
I find, for reasons both large and personal, the idea of Hillary Clinton as our nominee to be anathema. I will not discuss here the personal; that's a subject perhaps for another diary and another time. In the broader picture, I find her mode of campaigning to be at odds with the reasons I am a Democrat. I think Axelrod is right -- she'll do ANYTHING to win. The problem with Hillary is that it's all about Hillary. Whether it's exploiting race as a wedge issue, taking money from lobbyists and defending the practice, playing games with party rules or her inflated claims of "experience", I want no part of a Clinton presidency. This is not an easy position for me to come to; I worked for Bill, proudly, in 1992. I do not want the best chance for a progressive to be elected in a generation squandered on a candidate whose modus operandi is straight out of the GW Bush playbook, a way of operating that places personal connections and blind loyalty above party and competence. If, by fate, she becomes our nominee I will hold my nose, vote for her and plan on working on someone's primary challenge in 2012. I have no faith at all that she will bring about any change other than who sits behind the desk in the Oval Office. I'll hope that I'm badly mistaken, but judging by the utter incompetence of her campaign, I'm not holding my breath. How you run a campaign speaks volumes about a candidate and their ability to lead. On that test, she has failed miserably. The strategic errors in ignoring the caucus states tell me that she is not very good at strategic thinking. In foreign affairs, that matters.
So, if not Clinton, then who? Obama has the good fortune to be sitting on a large number of pledged delegates. If something happens and he "suspends" his campaign, he still gets them, even in the later tiers of the process that select at-large and party leader delegates. The trick then is to convince enough superdelegates that Clinton is an unacceptable nominee for a large part of the party's base. In stark political terms, I think she's alienated our most loyal voters -- African-Americans. Without them turning out in large numbers, we're sunk. So, in that sense, her candidacy has already been damaged. She doesn't see it that way of course, but facts are stubborn things. She's alienated a lot of people over the course of this race and if she succeeds in taking down Obama as she seems bent on doing, it will be nothing more than a Pyrrhic victory, for she will destroy her own candidacy in the process and, if nominated, jeopardize our chances for capturing the White House. The stakes this year are simply too high to take that chance, unless you want to see a continuation of the Bush policies on Iraq, the economy and health care.
As I noted earlier, I hope this whole diary is simply pointless speculation. But if, by some awful turn of events, it turns out not to be, then it will be utterly imperative to act quickly to make a case that Clinton is also damaged goods. And the search for an alternative will be on. Al Gore leaps to mind as one possibility, but whether he'd do it is an open question. I can name a number of people who would be acceptable to me; Russ Feingold is one. If Obama goes down, I want a real progressive on the ticket. Clinton isn't it.
I'm still behind Barack 100+%, but the stakes are far too high in this election to ignore any scenario with even a scintilla of possibility. As it is, this contest has already been the most unlikely of scenarios.
The stakes are as high as they've been in my lifetime. And that is exactly why progressives need to spend a little time thinking about the unthinkable. We have the delegates and we must make our voices heard if the unthinkable happens. If it does happen, we must do this for our party and more importantly -- for our nation.