Must-read post from Matt Bai at NYT: Open Letter to the Clintons

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Monday January 14, 2008 · 11:36 AM PST

2008/01/14 · 11:36

Matt Bai has been blogging at NYT's "The Caucus," and he just posted a thoughtful, insightful piece about decisions the Clintons need to make in this campaign moving forward. He's not biased toward one candidate or another (as far as I've been able to tell) and the piece is not polemical. But he clearly states that the Clintons are at a crossroads: Do they continue allowing the lowest level of political campaigning in order to win at any cost, or do they care about their legacy in this party?

The most dangerous place to stand in Washington is between Chuck Schumer and a bank of television cameras.

Well, that may be, but it seems to me that the most dangerous place to be in the rest of the country is between the Clintons and an elected office.

Just this weekend, after all the recent attacks against Barack Obama involving his kindergarten essay and cocaine, the "fairy tale" of his antiwar stance, we found out that the Nevada teacher’s union with ties to the Clintons is suing to keep workers on the Vegas Strip from being able to caucus in their workplaces, since most of those workers belong to unions that have endorsed Mr. Obama.

[...]

I wrote last week about how Mr. Obama was facing a perilous moment in his campaign. It seems to me that the same is true of the Clintons, and they may need to step back and briefly reflect. Both Clintons now find themselves in an unfamiliar reality, the kind of all-out war for the nomination that Bill Clinton twice managed to avoid. They will get all kinds of advice from people whose career opportunities are at stake and who will do or say anything to win. They are surrounded by overzealous politicians and interest groups willing do whatever it takes to shut down Barack Obama and deliver their states to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

[...]

No one expects Mrs. Clinton to stand down and let Mr. Obama make his case unchallenged. She could, however, send a clear message to the cogs in the machinery she’s built that there is a line she will not cross. She could tell her Nevada allies that the job of the Democratic Party she grew up in is to make it easier for people to caucus, not harder. She could tell Robert Johnson that he needs to apologize, the same way she forced Bill Shaheen, her New Hampshire co-chairman, to resign last month. She can make it plain to all those people trying to get jobs in the next Clinton Administration that there is way to win—a rough and combative way, even—that nonetheless won’t destroy all the good that the Clintons, at least for a lot of Democrats, have come to represent.

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