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A Not-So-Simple
Twist of Fate:
Could Hillary Bequeath Us Our Long-Awaited
Third Party?
By David Michael Green
07/03/08 "ICH"
-- -- Oh boy. Where have I seen this movie before?
I
think it was four years, surprisingly enough. Hey, what a
coincidence! Wasn’t there a presidential election going on back
then, too?
Remember how Howard Dean came out of near total obscurity, how
he started walloping the presumptive front-runner, John
“Fearless” Kerry, by taking bold positions (at least in the
context of American politics) against the war, and against
George W. Bush? Remember how Kerry changed his tune to ape
Dean’s message, and how nervous Democratic voters played it safe
and came home to the guy with the experience and the name
brand? Remember what an outstandingly effective candidate he
then turned out to be? Remember the “real deal”? (Oh, and what
a deal it was. I think experienced card players refer to that
hand as a ‘jack-shit straight, seven high’, if I’m not
mistaken.)
Is
this ringing any bells for anyone?
Only
Democrats could lose the White House in 2008. It’s hard to
imagine a more perfect storm favoring their decisive, landslide
victory. This should be 1932 redux, and then some. There’s a
reviled incumbent from the opposite party, already past his
expiration date four years ago when he stole a second election.
There’s a new nominee from that same party joined to him at the
hip on the most important issues, and stupid enough to be seen
as such publically. There’s the economy heading into a
recession after years of lethargy for the middle class. An
extremely unpopular war based on lies. A massive national
debt. A housing crisis. An environmental crisis. Gas at well
over three bucks a gallon. Oil over $100 a barrel. The dollar
at record lows and plummeting. Pension stocks falling and
cities falling apart – when they’re not literally drowning.
Scandals everywhere in the Republican Party. Three-fourths of
the country believing America to be on the wrong track. And
more. Put it all together and it’s an amazing scenario! It’s
like some poli sci professor somewhere was tinkering around with
a real-life statistical model, setting all the variables at max
to see how big a blow-out is theoretically possible. “Hey, I
wonder what happens if...?”
It’s
a perfect, perfect storm. And then along came Hillary. Look, I
certainly don’t object to her running if she wants to. But I do
object to how she’s running, and I think Democratic voters are
as dumb as a bag of hammers sitting out in the rain to pull the
handle for her. In this year of the great political tsunami,
Republicans have managed to – inadvertently, it would seem –
choose their best hope to hold on to the presidency, even if
they can’t quite stand their own choice. Hillary would be the
Democrats’ worst hope.
She
would go into the general election with all sorts of
pre-existing baggage and negatives. She would get smashed to
pieces by McCain on the very voter selection criteria she
herself has articulated for use against Obama: experience and
national security. McCain could virtually take her 3:00 a.m.
ad, pull her out and drop himself in, and use it against her.
And he will. Her candidacy is already ugly to contemplate, and
she hasn’t even released her tax filings yet. Aren’t Democrats
just brilliant? Hey, maybe she can get Kerry to be her running
mate! Perhaps Bob Shrum is free these days, and can finally
push himself into double digits on his personal best lifetime
count of presidential races lost (with zero wins), by managing
the campaign.
But
it’s not just Democrats going with the Clintons that alarms me,
it’s how they might win it. It is almost a mathematical
certainty that neither candidate can win the nomination by means
of gathering pledged delegates in the months ahead. Under the
proportional allocation system Democratic primaries and caucuses
tend to use, a candidate has to do exceedingly well in the
popular vote to realize a significant shift in delegates. It
would appear that Clinton’s got some favorable states ahead, and
that Obama has as many or perhaps more, unless momentum has
really shifted now, after Tuesday. I tend to doubt that is the
case, unless Obama goes all Massachusetts at this point, like
Kerry and Dukakis, and stands by helplessly watching the
steamroller as it relentlessly approaches. In which case, fine,
anyhow – get the clown off the stage, he’s not ready for
prime-time. As a tired American progressive, worn down by
disappointment across more decades of losing politics than I
care to count, I can abide many things. But one of them is not
another wimpy Democratic presidential nominee who gets
out-slugged by the latest Karl Rove and manages yet again to
seize defeat from the jaws of victory.
Anyhow, let’s say we end the primary season about where we are
now, with Obama about 100 delegates up, and having won more
votes and more states than Clinton, but with neither candidate
over the magic nomination-clinching line. It would be fairly
outrageous for the Clintons to seize the brass ring at that
point, but they will not care in the slightest what the
ramifications of their actions might be for the party or the
country. The Clintons will do anything – and I mean anything –
to get the presidency. This is a sickness that infects the
hearts and minds of some people much more than others. Because
of their own needs, most prominently a very deep-seated personal
insecurity, they simply need the validation of being president,
and they go after it like a heat-seeking missile headed toward a
power plant.
You
don’t want to get in their way, man. Road kill is no mere
metaphor when someone’s intensely-held life aspiration is on the
line and their moral bearings got tossed overboard sometime back
in their twenties. You don’t get that sense of desperate
pathological need from, say, Jimmy Carter or George McGovern,
while individuals like George H. W. Bush or Richard Nixon fairly
reeked of it. In the case of Bush the Elder, clearly the whole
point of being president was to be president. He didn’t seem to
have any ideas of what to do with the office once he got there.
In the case of his son, the whole point was to do it better than
Dad, and so he had lots of completely insane ideas of what he
wanted to do once he got there, particularly in areas like taxes
and Iraq, where Poppy had screwed-up on the way to losing a
second term (amateur!).
The
Clintons are very much cut from the same cloth as Old Man Bush.
Actually doing something in office is incidental to the main
project, which is the psychological satisfaction (and
reassurance) that comes from all the attention, glory and power
attached to the White House. Compared to that overwhelming
goal, they no more care about national health care than does
Sean Hannity. If they can win by going single-payer, so be it.
If they could win by war, the death penalty and welfare slashing
instead, they would. Indeed, they have. The point is that the
Clintons will do anything to secure the presidency, even if that
includes wrecking that part of the Democratic Party they didn’t
already wreck during the 1990s, and/or tossing a few body blows
in the direction of American democracy. The definitive model
here is the 2000 election, and the campaign I’m referring to
wasn’t Al Gore’s, ladies and gentlemen. More like the other one
in that race. Anyone with any doubt about what they’re capable
of needs to adjust the satellite dish on their igloo, and fast.
(If she does leave the race, it’s only because she absolutely
cannot see any mathematical possibility of winning whatsoever,
and she wants to preserve some shred of her reputation because –
and only because – she’ll be getting ready for 2012. Even if
there’s Democratic incumbent in the White House. Maybe
especially if there is.)
Far
more likely is that Clinton remains in the race, keeps it
competitive by staying within range delegate-wise, and marches
all the way to Denver fighting for the nomination. Then she
plays some card, or combination of cards, in order to
effectively steal it from Obama, despite his having won more
states, more votes and more pledged delegates. Perhaps she does
it using superdelegates. Perhaps she manages to get Florida and
Michigan counted. Perhaps she sues to invalidate her loss in
the Texas caucuses. Perhaps John Edwards (with anywhere from 12
to 61 delegates pledged to him, depending on whose count you
believe) wants very badly to be Vice President or Secretary of
State. Perhaps Bill cuts some sort of deal in a smoke-filled
room somewhere. Maybe it goes to the Supreme Court for
resolution (you know, those nice people in black robes who gave
you the George W. Bush presidency), and they decide in her
favor. Most likely she employs a combination of all these
gambits, and collectively they could possibly give her enough
delegates for a narrow technical (and very Pyrrhic) victory.
If
any of these scenarios play out, Obama should leave the
Democratic Party and run as a third-party candidate. Simple as
that.
It
would be the morally proper thing to do, and it just might even
be successful, especially in the longer term.
If
this seems an improbable quest, remember that Obama’s support is
quite passionate – he’s not just your standard-issue marginal
political preference for, say, Joe Biden over Chris Dodd. Nor
would this be some personal (and absurd) vanity project, like
Ross Perot’s. His supporters would be outraged at the stealing
of the nomination from its rightful owner, and they’re a
motivated bunch. Black voters would feel particularly slighted,
and would be likely to follow Obama elsewhere. That alone would
be enough to finish off the already badly-damaged Clinton
candidacy in the general election. Given this moral high
ground, too, I don’t think Obama would be perceived as the Ralph
Nader who gave the election to McCain. Perhaps, because of
access restrictions, he wouldn’t even be able to get on the
ballot in many places, except as a write-in.
In
the end, I don’t think it much matters. If he can’t win in
2008, the country will be ripe for the taking after four years
of John McSame. And Obama has shown us nothing this last year
if not excellence in organizing skills. There’s plenty of time
by 2012 to give birth to a real progressive party that has been
aching to calve off from the Democrats for three decades now.
If the Clintons and the Liebermans of this world want to hang
tight with their DLC party of Diet Pepsi Wall Street, let them.
If they feel a burning compulsion to become the Whigs of the
21st century, I for one won’t stand in the way.
The
idea of a third party alternative has long been a dream of
progressives in America. It has also too often been a fantasy
and a distracting albatross. Particularly since the Bill
Clinton era of centrist sell-out – but really going back to the
Reagan period of Democratic cowardice, the McGovern campaign of
entrenched Party power acting shamelessly toward their nominee,
and certainly the Johnson debacle in Vietnam – progressives have
been looking to ditch the shell of the former New Deal now doing
business as the corroded (and corrosive) Democratic Party.
Unfortunately – really, very unfortunately – it’s an almost
impossible trick to pull off given the structure of the American
political system, and
I have joined lots of other smarter people counseling
against the effort, suggesting an attempt at hijacking the
Democratic Party instead. Not for nothing was the last new
major party born in America 150 years ago. It’s not an accident
that for about three-fourths of the country’s history it’s been
Republicans or Democrats. Period.
Oddly enough, however, this is probably the year when the
country could come closest in a long time to seeing the birth of
a genuine third party. Theoretically, at least – if the right
sequence of events transpired. It’s probably a long-shot, and
not my personal preference for the short-term, but it is
feasible, it’s probably the only way to imagine overcoming the
considerable institutional barriers to creating a third party in
America, and doing so would be just the shot of adrenalin this
decrepit old political system needs. Moreover, there are –
believe it or not – still some folks out there who don’t yet get
the damage done by conservatism in America. Another four years
of the same may be just the tonic to finally seal that deal
forever.
So,
let me see here. We’d have a destroyed Republican Party, a
destroyed Democratic Party, and a new progressive, “Fired-Up!”
party rising out of their ashes. We could do a lot worse than
that. And we could thank Hillary Clinton for it all, if it
happens.
Sometimes a silver-lining can turn into a whole pot of gold.
David Michael Green is a
professor of political science at Hofstra University in New
York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his
articles (
dmg@regressiveantidote.net ), but regrets that time
constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work
can be found at his website,
www.regressiveantidote.net .
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