My Hillary Dejection
By William Arnone on August 18, 2008 at 12:10 PM in Hillary Clinton
On Wednesday, August 6, I spoke with Hillary Clinton for the first time since she suspended her Presidential campaign. She held a thank-you reception in Manhattan for those of us who helped her.
My role in her campaign was as a volunteer advisor. My focus was on older voter issues and strategy. In every primary and caucus, including those where Senator Obama won big, Senator Clinton carried older voters by huge margins. I like to say that, if we could have raised the voting age to 50, she would have wrapped up the nomination last spring. I’m still getting emails from senior leaders and supporters of Senator Clinton in which they swear that they will either sit out the general election or actually vote for John McCain.
I attended this event hoping that she’d be able to lift me, along with so many of her most fervent supporters, out of our continued funk. Although I have had recent conversations with the Obama campaign about older voters, whom polls show he is losing to Senator McCain by double-digit margins, my heart still isn’t in it. I’ve been asking myself and others who feel the same way: Why is it taking us so long to, in the words of Obama supporters, “get over it?”
Now that it seems certain that Senator Clinton will not be Senator Obama’s running mate, I’ve come to grips with the fact that this Presidential campaign will not include Hillary Clinton’s voice and presence front and center. Over the past few months, I’ve missed her being in the daily political news. This void will now last through the general election.
What I’m seeing instead, and what has kept me from enthusiastically supporting Senator Obama thus far, is a replay of the primary/caucus contest. Each day in the give-and-take between the Obama and McCain camps I’m reminded of what had happened in the earlier campaign. From the questions of experience, qualifications, and substance, to the awful alleged playing of the race card, I can’t help but see a rerun unfolding.
What concerns me most, however, is the likely outcome. Senator Clinton ran her campaign for the nomination with an astute eye toward the general election. She knew that a Democratic candidate who catered too narrowly to our party’s base of activists (of which I’m one) would have a difficult time winning over independent voters, who will decide the election in November.
Unlike Senator Obama, who (as one of Senator Clinton’s Texas supporters has noted) has positioned himself as a candidate of transformation and is running essentially on his persona, she took on the mantle of transition and ran more on her policies. While the Obama coalition was focused more on the affluent and the highly educated, her case was directed largely at middle-class and lower-income voters. In contrast with Senator Obama’s appeal to hope as the dominant emotion, hers was to confidence as a more compelling response to the predictable Republican play to fear. In many ways (as
I’ve written before in a letter published in the May 6th edition of The New York Times), her approach was similar to the Presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, for whom I worked forty years ago and who still inspires everything I do politically. I believe that her strategy was the right one for a Democratic victory in November.
In a good-faith attempt to feel better about Senator Obama, I went back to his earliest speeches at the start of his candidacy to see what I had missed. I was struck by the not-so-subtle attacks on the Clinton years and his negative portrayal of Senator Clinton’s motives that were at the heart of his pitch. For example, in December 2007 in Des Moines, Iowa, Senator Obama opened his “Our Moment is Now” speech by noting that he was not running for the Presidency “to fulfill some long-held ambition or because I believed it was somehow owed to me.” He later added: “But you can’t at once argue that you’re the master of a broken system in Washington and offer yourself as the person to change it.”
I also went back to his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” in which he belittles “the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation.” As Matt Bai wrote in The New York Times: “Obama, meanwhile, has been going after the Clinton legacy with a third story line: Boomer fatigue…If you really want things to stay that way, he says, then vote for another Clinton and watch these self-obsessed baby boomers go at it all over again.” As a Boomer myself, I did see Senator Clinton as a quintessential candidate of my generation.
In November, voters aged 44 to 62, will constitute at least one-third of the vote and will play a critical role in key battleground states. For Boomers, the election of 2008 might have been our last chance to give the nation a leader from our ranks, who might fulfill our world-changing promise of the sixties. Many of us feel that, despite our size and our passions, we have not yet delivered on that promise. Ironically, Senator Obama, who by and large denigrates the sixties, has put himself forward as precisely the type of candidate we thought we would generate. Yet Senator Clinton, who is much more a product of the sixties, focused with more precision and depth on those issues that appeal most to this generation, such as retirement security, health care, economic justice, and human rights. And it is the absence of substantive discussion of these issues that I’m also missing in the campaign thus far.
Compounding this dismay is the apparent attempt by the Democratic Party to conduct a very different type of convention in Denver than we have historically had. In response, several groups have been formed to press the party leadership for an open convention. (I wrote about the prospect of an open convention several months ago. If you did not get a copy and would like to receive one, please send me an email with the word “CONVENTION” in the subject matter.) One of them, The Denver Group (www.thedenvergroup.blogspot.com) is calling upon delegates to sign a petition to place Senator Clinton’s name in nomination, along with Senator Obama’s. This will ensure that the roll call of the states and their delegations will reflect the results of their primaries and caucuses. It will also enable pledged delegates and superdelegates to go on record on the first ballot with their choice of a Presidential candidate. In the words of The Denver Group: “We must strive for a true sense of unity in the Party and avoid the damaging upheaval that would accompany a counterfeit consensus.”
So, what did I expect last evening? If Hillary Clinton had looked me in the eye and said, “Bill, do for Barack Obama exactly what you were doing and would have done for me,” then I would devote all of my energy to helping him and would encourage others to do the same.
Instead, what I heard was a candid acknowledgment that it is taking more time for some to transfer their enthusiasm to another candidate after so closely contested and contentious a campaign for the nomination. Senator Clinton did say that she preferred that we make as our top priority uniting to elect a Democratic President in November. She offered, however, as an alternative that we work hard to elect more Democrats to the Senate. Sitting on the sidelines in this critical election is simply not an option.
I believe that the burden remains on Senator Obama, his campaign team, and the leadership of the Democratic Party to show genuine respect for Senator Clinton’s candidacy — its content, character and constituencies — and provide real opportunities for her supporters to play meaningful roles in the fall campaign.
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