Reasons for Hillary To Stay In The Race

A lot of people have been making arguments for Hillary Clinton to get out of the presidential race. After all, they claim, she's pretty much mathematically eliminated, she can't win -- what's the point?

Well, recently Senator Clinton pointed out why she's still in a race she has no chance of winning -- after all, she said, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June. There's no telling what could happen.

And you know, she does make a certain amount of sense. So I decided to tote up all the things that could conceivably intervene between now and the convention that would necessitate making Hillary Clinton, and not Barack Obama, the nomineee of the Democratic Party:

• Obama could be shot by a crazed gunman in love with Jodie Foster.
• He could be shot by Jodie Foster.
• He could be eaten by a puma.
• He could develop a crack habit.
• He could contract bubonic plague.
• A sex tape could surface in which he performs with Paris Hilton.
• He could turn out to be Canadian.
• He could be caught in a public restroom reading The Fountainhead to a truck driver.
• He could be struck by a bolt of lightning.

You see? Any of these are real possibilities. So get off Hillary's case! She's just playing the percentages. After all, shit happens, and if anyone knows how to take advantage of shit...

Tom Moran

A Good Year To Be A Democrat

This is starting to look like it might be historic.

A wildly unpopular president. A party in tatters. A young, charismatic candidate. A party that's hungry to regain power. A country that wants to go in any direction but the direction it's going.

There's change in the air. Can you smell it?

(God, I'm starting to sound like Peggy Noonan.)

Certain Republicans can smell it -- some of them, anyway.

Former National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Davis can see what's happening after three losses in three consecutive special elections -- in Louisiana, Illinois and most recently in Mississippi.

Democrats winning in Mississippi. Mississippi. Fucking Mississippi.

Just think about that for second.

“The political atmosphere facing House Republicans this November is the worst since Watergate and is far more toxic than the fall of 2006," Davis is quoted by Politico as writing, "when we lost 30 seats (and our majority) and came within a couple of percentage points of losing another 15 seats. Whether measured by polls, open seats, money, voter registration, generic ballot, presidential popularity or issues, our party faces a steep climb to maintain our current numbers.”

That's putting it mildly. Our party faces imminent disaster is more like it.

Can you spell "filibuster-proof majority"? Because that's starting to look like a distinct possibility. When voters in Mississippi start going for the Democrats, real change is about to happen.

Davis is saying that the GOP could lose 19 seats in the House -- and if he's willing to go that far, who knows how big the real number could end up being?

I'm not counting the Republicans out yet. They could try any number of Swiftboat-like attacks on Obama and the Democrats in a desperate attempt to hold onto power. It might just work.

But things are looking very positive right now. People are fed up with the Republicans and their bullshit, and are in a mood to throw the bums out. And I don't blame them.

Which makes it a good year to be a Democrat.

Tom Moran

Hillary's Agenda

Stick a fork in her, she's done -- right?

I mean, it's over. Obama is the nominee -- right?

So why is Hillary still in the race?

After all, people tend to do things for a reason, and Hillary is nothing if not motivated, so if she's still in the race, and refuses to concede reality not to mention the election results, it must be that she has some agenda that we haven't figured out yet.

What could that agenda be?

Bob Herbert wrote a scathing column in the New York Times about Hillary's latest attempt to belittle Barack Obama:

The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.

Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

Ouch!

I hate to admit it, but Herbert's right on the money here. Hillary is desperate and resorting to the worst sort of Lee Atwater tactics in order to pull victory out of the jaws of an all-but-certain defeat.

She's lost. She has to know that. Hillary Clinton is many things -- stupid isn't one of them.

So what's going on here? What is her agenda?

There are a couple of possiblities.

One is that she's just putting one foot in front of the other because she doesn't know how to do anything else -- sheer dogged determination has gotten the Clintons so much of what they've wanted in the past, and they've perservered and won when anyone else would have given up (after the Gennifer Flowers revelations just before the New Hampshire primary in '92; after the Lewinsky scandal first broke; during the impeachment hearings) that they're going through the motions simply because it's worked before.

Another possibility is that she's staying in hoping that something -- anything -- will happen to change the outcome, rather like the poker player who's deep in the hole and keeps betting anyway in the hopes that the next hand will turn things around. She strikes me as being too rational for this scenario, but I guess we can't rule it out. Anyone who lived through the year 1968 (and that would include me) can't rule it out either.

Then there's the ugly scenario. The really ugly scenario, which some pundits have begun to whisper. I'd like to think that Hillary isn't capable of this kind of Machiavellian thinking. But I have to admit that it's possible this could be the real deal.

It could be that Hillary knows that if Barack Obama wins in 2008 and is reelected in 2012, that would mean it would be 2016 before the White House became open again. And it would be unlikely that Hillary can pull off the nomination by then. So what does she do? It's now or never.

There's only one other option: to so damage and weaken Obama by her attacks during the primary campaign that he loses to an elderly John McCain, who then leaves office after one term making it possible for Hillary to run and win in 2012.

Would she do that? Would she so betray the standard bearer of her own party (not to mention the party itself) in order to obtain power?

What do you think?

Tom Moran