http://www.counterpunch.org/green05102008.htmlIt's So Over By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN
It’s over. Maybe Hillary doesn’t know it yet. Almost assuredly Bill doesn’t. But it’s over.
And, no, I don’t just mean the Democratic presidential nomination process. I mean the whole shootin’ match. Obama is the nominee and Obama is the forty-fourth president of the United States. You heard it here first.
Sure, it’s possible for this thing to derail, not least because of an October Surprise abroad engineered by Dick Cheney to keep himself out of jail. But, short of that, fughedaboudit! And even that most despicable of classic political ploys may not work anymore. If anything, the Reverend Wright episode has demonstrated that the historically immature American electorate night just be angry and desperate enough not to be distracted this time by the latest Willie Horton ad or gay marriage spectacle. There are powerful signs that the old black magic doesn’t work anymore.
I watched some in the media talking about Clinton in the past tense Tuesday night, and interpreting her speech in Indiana as a valedictory. Do they really actually pay these bloviators to blunder all over my television screen? Heck, I’d get it right for a quarter of what these would-be pundits charge!
Let’s see here. She twice asked people to go to her website and contribute money. She made her astonishingly duplicitous case, dripping with hypocrisy, for ‘not disenfranchising the people of Florida and Michigan’. She beat the drum of her new issue – the summer gas tax repeal – no less than three times. She began with that idiotic line – complete with that idiotic pasted-on clown-face smile of hers – quoting Obama about calling Indiana the tie-breaker (which state she then proceeded to nearly lose). She’s out there this week campaigning and fundraising.
And, my favorite of all, her campaign apparently invented yet another criterion for choosing the party’s nominee, one that all the rest of us are supposed to take seriously, just like the others. Remember when we began, and it was all about getting the necessary 2,025 delegates? But when that started to look like it might not happen, every other week we got a new metric, depending which particular stock happened to be rising or falling at the time. Talk about your moving goal posts! Hillary should get the nomination because she was winning swing states. Nope, make that big states. Nope, make that non-caucus states. (Because caucus states are, er... Well, just because.) Anyhow, make that states that will have the most Electoral College votes after November. Nope, make that the popular vote. Nope, that doesn’t work either.
Are you ready for this one? Last night her people were saying that the nomination should now require more than 2,025 delegates to secure. Why? Well, because..., because... Because that’s the only possible way for her to win, Silly! And, after all, what other criteria could possibly matter? Dang, if Al Gore had had the legal team of Clinton and Clinton arguing his case in 2000, the Supreme Court would have given him the presidency just to make them go away. Oh, and about a million Iraqis would be alive today that now aren’t.
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But it ain’t flyin’ anymore. People are just really sick and tired with the old school and the damage it has wrought. It’s way, way overdue, but I must say I like the way this election is shaping up rather a lot. The regressive burn-out retreads are imploding in debt and failure. The Clintons have destroyed their (utterly false) reputations for integrity, let alone competence, and dumped over $11 million of their own money into the bankrupt corporation called Hillary 2008. That is an outcome that could not be more well deserved. McCain and his biblical blight of a political party is next, and I have little doubt of their fate.
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The only real question remaining on the Democratic side is who will the VP choice be. Poor Obama. On the one hand, he kinda has to ask Clinton. Her supporters are gonna be pretty insulted if he doesn’t. On the other, he’d be pretty crazy to do so. Can anyone see Hillary, let alone Bill, taking a back seat to President Obama? Keeping their mouths shut and staying out of mischief for eight years? And let’s not forget that Hillary Clinton is still Hillary Clinton. Her negatives overwhelm her positives throughout the country, more so even than they did before this campaign. She certainly won’t add votes to the ticket. All she does is keep some of them from defecting.
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To be a progressive in America is to condemn yourself to a lifetime of disappointment, watching your country lurch from political stupidity to imbecilic tragedy, watching every decent candidate you’ve ever supported getting hammered and humiliated, and you along with them, by proxy.
Dare I say it? This year feels different.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. MORE
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