Clintons Face Democrats' Distaste
As the results came through in Iowa, the Clintons discovered it was not just a vast right-wing conspiracy that wanted them kept out of the White House. A vast left-wing conspiracy, too, it seems, was working against them.
How Senator Clinton responds to her third-place finish will decide not only whether she gets the chance to prove her many opponents wrong, but whether the Democrats can turn the evidently widespread distaste for Washington politics into victory in November.
Everything that followed Mrs. Clinton's loss was clumsily handled by her campaign, from her foolhardy "victory celebration," surrounded by an Addams family of old retainers, to her blithe suggestion that mere caucuses amount to little and that the race will only begin in earnest when the people of New Hampshire cast their votes.
It would be tempting to imagine after such a stinging defeat, a cruel but crucial whisker behind Senator Edwards, that Mrs. Clinton is finished and that just one more body blow will see her pack her tent and return to the Senate. But that would be to vastly underestimate the toughness of the Clintons, the size of their war chest, and the strength and determination of their political machine.
After New Hampshire comes South Carolina, with its large population of African Americans, who, in the post-Obama landscape, may be expected to desert "America's first black president," Bill Clinton, in favor of someone who has a more authentic claim to the title. Yet even three losses in a row will not see an end to the long-plotted presidential bid hatched over the Clintons' kitchen table in Arkansas sometime in the 1970s. The Clinton juggernaut will thunder on at least until the avalanche of primaries on February 5, and even then the senator will concede defeat only if she loses New York and California. By a quirk of fate, Mrs. Clinton may be obliged to follow Mayor Giuliani's audacious playbook, ignoring the small states and the little people in favor of superstates with large legions of delegate votes.
In the meantime, New York's junior senator is busily retooling her campaign. If the notion of "hope" is forever lost to Senator Obama, Mrs. Clinton is determined to wrest from him the coveted mantle of "change."
As her feisty and often angry performance in the debate in Manchester, N.H., on Saturday night presaged, she is pressing upon voters her belief that the "change" all Democratic candidates agree the country needs is severely put at risk, not made more likely, by the selection of a callow candidate.
As Margaret Thatcher reveled in her Soviet sobriquet "The Iron Lady," so Mrs. Clinton is happy to be thought of as a woman of steel. The lessons of Lady Thatcher's reign do not stop there. As Senator Clinton insisted in the debate, to be the first female president would provide a wealth of change not only throughout Washington and America but also in the world at large. As Lady Thatcher's rival for the Conservative leadership, Willie Whitelaw, once cracked, "If it is a woman you are looking for, I'm your man."
While President Clinton butters up big crowds with tales of the good old days, his wife is hell-bent on assaulting Mr. Obama's "achievements." As she told Time magazine's Mark Helperin on her campaign bus yesterday, "I think it is time we looked at 'talk' versus 'action' and we really see who has bought the special interests, who has really carried through, who has produced the results for people."
She will hammer away at Mr. Obama's flip-flops, among them: the hiring of a drug companies' lobbyist as his New Hampshire campaign chairman; his speech against the Patriot Act, followed by a vote for it; his anti-lobbyist rules that still allow parties to be thrown for congressmen, so long as they stay on their feet to eat; his claim to have passed the Patients' Bill of Rights, which never made it into law; his vote for Vice President Cheney's energy bill; his much fanfared opposition to the Iraq War, then his vote to fund it. She will also offer a challenge to the political press to rediscover their skepticism and vet Mr. Obama's statements, background, and record with the same enthusiasm with which they have crawled all over her résumé. Amid the euphoria of his eloquent victory speech, Mr. Obama is currently enjoying a reporting deficit which, as the new front-runner, should not last.
If the name Barack Obama rarely passes Mrs. Clinton's lips, it is more often than she will mention John Edwards. Mrs. Clinton may hope the buddy-buddy alliance the grim former trial lawyer has forged with Mr. Obama will split the vote against her. It is her one piece of good news. With just a day left before voting begins in the Granite State, Mr. Edwards, in third place in the polls, can only gain ground by pulling down his newfound partner.
nwapshott@nysun.com
