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Edited on Sat Apr-12-08 08:03 AM by BeyondGeography
In the past month, Hillary Clinton has been handed two golden opportunities to rise above the muck of primary politics. In both cases, she has instead played a small-minded, Republican-style game of gotcha that will prove to have done nothing to change the nature of this race.
Her responses have also shown why there was always an opportunity for someone like Obama to win over those Democrats who were looking for something more than a predictable politician who thinks sound-bites and a take-no-prisoners daily media strategy is more important than connecting with the hearts and minds of voters. If there's anyone who "looks down" on people and thinks we can't rise above media manipulation, it's Hillary.
On Rev. Wright, the proper response for her would have been to call bullshit on the whole "scandal," and take the media to task for playing guilt by association on Obama and reducing one man's work of 30-plus years to a single 30-second soundbite loop. This should have been done the weekend before Obama's speech.
Would this have helped Obama? Sure. But it also would have been gutsy, principled and endeared her to all but the most anti-Hillary Democrats and, most importantly, started to re-build a much needed bridge to black voters, whose support she would need in the event that she somehow made it to the convention with a hope of winning the nomination.
Instead, she sat paralyzed for a few days and, once Obama turned the tide with his speech on race, tried to keep the story alive by saying, "that wouldn't have been my pastor." That was a Republican response. Also, her initial silence left open a void that was completely filled by Obama.
She played Republican again when Obama was shown to have made a clumsily-worded, although accurate statements about working class resistance to Democrats in general and him in particular. BitterGate basically revolves around the whole "What's the Matter with Kansas" problem that plagues the entire party, not just Obama.
Obama said in his comments in San Francisco that he has the extra challenge of being a black guy with a strange name, but the problems he faces in winning over rural white voters are there for every Democrat. There are 67 counties in Pennsylvania, and Ed Rendell lost 57 of them when he won the governorship. Obama is getting to heart of a matter that all Democrats should be working on, but that's risky, and it doesn't conform with the known and narrow path to dysfunctional political victory, where we "win" but we have difficulty governing, so most don't go there.
Instead of addressing the real substance of what Obama said, our Hillary predictably used the occasion score a night-time political point. She used bland, insincere, Disney-style language about the "hard-working, roll-up-your-sleeves, optimistic" people of Pennsylvania. She again left the rhetorical field wide open for Obama to address the real issues at hand.
In this, as in the larger question of this contest, advantage Obama.
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