I finally get the Clinton camp's strategy, and it's NOT the Tonya Harding option. No, they're going for that nomination, all right. Nor are they trying to persuade any "undecided" superdelegates to endorse Clinton. No superdelegate could possibly be undecided at this point.
No, what the Clinton need is to give the SDs an EXCUSE to hand Hillary the nomination (which most of them want to do but fear the disarray such action will put the Democratic party in). And to provide this EXCUSE the Clintons are quite simply "going nuclear" on Obama. Make him "unelectable", no matter how. Bill Clinton prepared the public for what's coming by making a veiled announcement of this strategy when he said recently "I don't give a rip about all this name calling... Let's just saddle up and have an argument." And more importantly, this announcement is a signal to Hillary's surrogates to go all out: they have their campaign's blessing.
Their strategy is one of good-ol' character assassination, plain and simple. No-holds-barred, down-and-dirty mud-slinging. The hell with intra-party decorum. Anything goes: timely reminders of the Wright controversy, questioning Obama's patriotism, questioning his Christianity, questioning his generosity to charities. I expect that they will soon start attacking Michelle Obama personally, and also Obama's deceased father. Misleading insinuations about Rezko will be thrown into the mix. No attack will be too low, too tasteless, or too depraved.
And they will capitalize on the fact that Obama has foresworn this kind of campaigning, and that part of his appeal is precisely this commitment to the high road.
It will be like beating up a handcuffed man.
As I wrote, the goal of all this is to give the SDs the EXCUSE to vote for Hillary on the grounds that Obama is just too politically damaged to be electable. This doesn't need to be demonstrably true; only halfway plausible. Nor it matters that it was Clinton and her campaign who did the damage (they can always argue that the Republicans would have done it too; better get it out of the way now). All the SDs need is an EXCUSE to hand Clinton the nomination. And they want to do it sooner than later, to have more time to manage the ensuing chaos within the party.
This scenario not only fits perfectly with the latest mudslinging from the Clinton campaign, and in particular with Bill Clinton's recent "Let's just saddle up and have an argument", but also it explains why no superdelegate has heeded Bill Richardson's exhortation to step up to the plate, and presumably endorse Obama. Clearly Richardson is not in the Democratic party's ruling cabal's loop. It is pretty clear that a large fraction the remaining undeclared SDs want to vote for Clinton (I suspect this is because a reformer like Obama terrifies them), but are taking a wait-and-see attitude for fear of what nominating Clinton could do to the party. Similarly, the few remaining undeclared pro-Obama SDs are scared of what a devastating retaliation from the Clintons, especially if she wins the White House.
Kynn