My Take: Clinton's Rovian Path to "Victory"

Hillary Clinton's lead went from 20 points in the polls in Pennsylvania only weeks ago to about 8-10 points as the last election results trickle in. This will gain her somewhere in the range of 8-12 delegates in a state that was dominated by Gov. Ed Rendell's old-style -- but still mighty -- political machine pulling out all the stops on her behalf.

Obama still retains his essentially insurmountable lead in pledged delegates and votes. Clinton needed a blowout to even pretend the nomination is still in play, and she didn't get it. This, of course, hasn't stopped Terry McAuliffe and the rest of the Clinton spinners from openly begging for money on TV for her in-the-red campaign so she can continue her path to "victory." I find this highly ironic, to say the least, given McAuliffe's long-time mockery of Dean-style politics, the power of the net, grassroots activism and small donor fundraising. Any port in a storm I guess.

If Democrats with power in the superdelegate group and beyond don't stop her soon, she will surely try to continue her quest for personal political power at the expense of Democrats and Democratic principles right onto the Pepsi Center floor in Denver. And if that happens, we will lose in November. Plain and simple. Not only will there be few crossover votes, but huge swaths of activists, new and young voters and the African-American community will sit on their hands.

I agree with the New York Times editorial board, which previously endorsed Hillary Clinton, in their op-ed entitled The Low Road to Victory:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Women, Feminism, Progressivism
I'd like every woman in my age group who has voted for Clinton to explain to me how they can overlook her vote for the Iraq invasion and her continuing Bush-Rove-McCain-style macho war rhetoric -- and somehow manage to stick to the notion that Hillary is representing anything even vaguely related to a progressively feminist point of view. By ignoring the realities of Clinton's campaign strategy and positions, these women voters are rewarding a supposedly Democratic politician for cravenly pushing more of the same militaristic, fear-based rhetoric that has produced fiascos and horrors of the worst kind for almost eight years.

Is it really worth the "loyalty to gender" rush if you have to twist yourself into an illogical pretzel to pretend she's for peace and the people and diplomacy? If women can still vote in droves for Hillary Clinton after what she has done and continues to do and say, I have to admit that the women's movement I've been a part of has been a failure in some very critical ways.

Sorry. In my book genitals that match mine don't trump savage war mongering and fear-based campaigning on the part of a female candidate, I don't care who she is. Clinton and her campaign are playing to the same reptilian fear-centers of the brain so faithfully targeted by right-wing Repubs and neocons. And women over a certain age who should know better are supporting that in large numbers? It boggles the mind.

Photos by AP.

Technorati Tags:Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Pennsylvania, Karl Rove, John McCain, George Bush, feminism, Democrats, primaries, women, war, militarism