On Why Obama Has Already Lost (UPDATED)
Mon Mar 17, 2008 at 12:05:39 PM PDT
To LarsThorwald: THANK YOU! for giving my diary so much more publicity! I never expected that. I was glad to see that since you could not legitmately refute any of the points I made, you had to resort to snark. Typical! Your cleverness is a sign of cynicism. Be proud of that cynicism! It is cynicism like yours that will do your own candidate in by the end.
From the beginning, his campaign was driven by a cult of personality based off of the popularity of his two books, and not from any real political education or success. He is essentially not a political figure. The article in the NYTimes a week ago, which spoke about his "star role" but his "minor status" in the Senate, and his easy non-contested route to DC, help to prove that point. The article further shows that, before he even got there, the Senate was not big enough for his ambitions: he craved media stardom, he believed he has a special status.
While the word on everyone's lips was "hope," he tapped into and exploited a civic-spiritual despair among voters who yearned for some higher meaning in their lives, since America has no concrete cultural and spiritual traditions of its own. As David Brooks said, "they don't need a president, they need a feeling."
His voters on average don't have to worry about their health-insurance, their investment funds, their retirement funds, or much else. They want and need a symbol that gives their lives meaning, at least for eight years, until consumer trends change and they get tired of that symbol and want a new product in the form of a new face.
That he has failed to connect with the working-class, the backbone of the county, and the largest segment of the population, is telling, and a warning. Although they may be less "educated" - meaning they haven't spent upwards of 100k to purchase a diploma from a private college where students who can afford it do drugs, plagarize papers, and sleep around, while their professors play at politics and frantically try to secure their tenure by publishing unreadbale academic papers in journals that never see the light of day - the working-class is well-educated in bullsh*t, they know it when they see it, and they have largely rejected his campaign.
Things seemed to be going well for him until two weeks ago, after he lost Ohio and Texas, two states that do matter - no matter what you say - and his campaign went into free-fall, with his academic advisors shooting their mouths off in all directions and contradicting the very things he had said on the trail. When the chips were down and the opposition was strong, each member of his team self-destructed in their own way, including the candidate himself who stormed out of his own press conference after taking only eight questions, because those questions were not laudatory and fawning. In one of the debates, he said that he sees the role of president as a figurehead who gathers around him a really smart group of people to run things while the figurehead is off pacifying the people with telepromted speeches. But we saw that week that he cannot control his advisors, and further that those advisors are amatuers when it comes to politics, since they have mostly played at politcs within the precincts of the corporate-molded and funded ivy league. This is not the group of people who are going to end the war in Iraq, win the war in Afganistan, deal with Iran, turn this economy around, and institute health-care reform, much less insititute universal health-care. This is a group of people who want to feel good about themselves, and from their comments, it is clear that it all about them, not about the American people.
This weekend we had the Wright debacle. That it took the media so long to focus on Wright is a mystery since it was there from the beginning. There was an article in the NYTimes a few months ago that detailed how Obama played the racial divide from the beginning of the campaign, purposefully avoiding black events while he was campaigning in Iowa in order not to alienate the white voters there and then whipping up racial resentments when it suited his purposes in South Carolina. The United States is not a color-blind country and the majority of Americans do not and will not like being called racists, which is what the Obama campaign is now doing at every turn. Just yesterday the new pastor of Obama's church decried the depiciton of Wright by the media as racist and compared it to the assisination of MLK Jr. Geraldine Ferraro was on the money in her response to the attacks on her coming from the Obama camp and that is why her comments reverberated so strongly throughout the country: anytime anyone says anything slightly critical of Obama or his campaign, even when Obama or his campaign is in the wrong, they are immediately labeled a racist, and the majority of Americans - and especially the Republicans and Independents - won't stand for that. Some argue that the Wright debacle has had no impact and that the media has already moved on. But these kinds of things work slowly on the consciousness. They linger after the public discussion has faded. They influence opinion sliently over time. And since race is an issue few people discuss openly because of the PC police and self-censorship, it will be especially true in this case. The test will come in PA and the states after. If his support among whites dries up then we know that the Wright debacle was damaging. The Wright debacle is also another instance of Obamian double-talk: he presents himself as "post-racial" and yet there is his pastor making comments that make Al Sharpton seem mild in comparison.
The meme being pushed by his campaign is that the election is about the math in the end. Yet another instance of double-talk: it is the least inspiring or hopeful argument one could make for a path to the nomination. But a primary election like this is not about the math in the end, it is about narrative and momentum and demographics. The second meme being pushed by his campaign is that the so-called superdelegates must follow the "will" of the voters. But that is not what the superdelegates were instituted to do; in fact, they were instituted to do exactly the opposite: to stop the nomination from going to an unelectable insurgent who misled the American people early on in the campaign, and this year they will be called upon to do just that, and they will.
When push comes to shove, there is no way the elders of the Democratic party are going to give the nomination to a cipher who can't win a big democratic state primary, who can't control the people on his staff when the going gets tough, who played the racial deivide at every turn, and who misled the American people on his plans for withdrawal from Iraq, NAFTA, and health-care.
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Now, from the beginning Hillary Clinton miscalculated in thinking there would be an outporuing of nostalgia for the 1990s. Starting out, camp Clinton must have thought that after eight years of Bush fascism the country would be filled with a fevered desire to turn back the clock to the year 2000 and pretend like everything that came after never happened. But the United States is a country with no historical memory whatsoever. (Gore Vidal: "the United States of Amnesia"). In the US, there is no sense of the past beyond the latest music single that came out last week, so the 1990s or before might as well be the Ice Age.
Camp Clinton further failed to realize that Presidents in the post-WWII era are nothing more than consumer products with a built-in-life cycle of eight years at the most: shiny and new at the beginning, get some wear and tear, and finally are to be discarded in the trash heap of history. Not having realized this, or having forgotten it, they brought Bill Clinton back from the dust bin, which is the biggest mistake they made bar none. He now appears to be making the rounds again.
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The longer this goes on the better it is for Clinton. By winning Ohio and Texas, she came closer to nailing the nomination. If she wins PA, the tide probably turns for good.
