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When your soft side backfires Tuesday, Feb 26, 2008 By John Brummett Hillary Clinton is capable of a spontaneous personal moment on the campaign trail. We saw one in New Hampshire. I'm not sure we've seen any since. She could not have known that day in New Hampshire that a woman would ask about the special difficulties facing women. The woman asking the question assured everyone afterward that it wasn't planned. Then, as if to demonstrate her independence, the woman asserted that she had voted for Barack Obama. Hillary surely was emotionally inclined already that day, exhausted and facing imminent extinction in the presidential race. She's not good enough to moisten her eyes artificially. If she was that gifted as an actress, she'd be doing better in the presidential race. But those moments have been otherwise rare, even nonexistent. For all the warmth and humor and spontaneity her friends assign to her from private moments, Clinton's candidate incarnation is overwhelmingly calculating and disciplined. She opted strategically to go soft in last week's debate with Obama. She decided that harsh attacks might backfire at the very moment she stood a chance to win a couple of big states. She feared that calling Obama unprepared to be commander in chief would anger Democrats and give John McCain something to quote should Obama proceed to the nomination. She can't seem so self-serving that she would offer up Obama to the Republicans. Then the last question - about when the candidates had been tested - gave her the opening to try to take some of the hard edge off herself. It had worked well spontaneously in New Hampshire. She invoked the famous travails of her marriage to assert that, all those woes aside, she has a wonderful life compared to the far more trying circumstances besetting others. She said she was proud to be on the stage with Obama. Here's an important point, especially for Hillary defenders: I'm not saying this soft moment was false. I'm saying it was well-considered. There's not a chance in the world she was playing that vital debate by ear. But the trouble was that analysts started talking about the moment as a sign of her awareness of looming defeat. They called it the first draft of a concession. The word of the day became "valedictory." Her human side was appealing, yes, but revealing it had boomeranged on her tactically. It's possible there was some glimmer of that resignation deep in her soul. But she hadn't meant at all to start accepting defeat. She'd been trying to connect with voters to pursue victory. Donors, super-delegates and voters in Texas and Ohio didn't need to hear that she was beginning an exit phase of her candidacy. They needed to stay motivated. So, two days later, she did something about it. She decided to get suddenly outraged about mailers from the Obama campaign that had been floating around Ohio for a couple of days. Why, she'd just been handed them by someone in the crowd, she said. Why, these are outrageous distortions, she said. "Shame on you," she scolded Obama. She called the mailings a Karl Rove tactic, as if to plop down her trump card. Then she literally called Barack out. She said for him to meet her in the next debate in Ohio, which will be tonight in Cleveland. My goodness. She wasn't a bad actress after all. She can do rage. One of those Obama mailers accused Hillary of being against NAFTA now even though she was for it when her husband pushed it through in 1993. NAFTA is a dirty word among working people in the Rust Belt. Hillary says she had nothing to do with NAFTA in the White House. Indeed, she was busy at the time messing up health care. Obama strikes back with quotes from her over the years referring to NAFTA as one of her husband's best presidential accomplishments and saying the treaty had generally benefitted New Yorkers. Obama's charge is hardly from whole cloth. Everyone knows that, on trade, the Clinton White House was corporatist and Republicanish. This was hardly worthy of the mad fit Hillary feigned. The other mailer said that Hillary, by mandating health insurance in her universal coverage proposal, would force people who can't afford insurance to buy it. She says she offers financial help for those needing it in her plan. She says Obama must not be in favor of Harry Truman's dream of universal health care. He says he most certainly is in favor it, but without imposing sanctions on some poor person for not meeting a government mandate to buy something he can't afford. This is the kind of difference that will get decided in a Senate Finance Committee mark-up if either of these candidates becomes president and enjoys a solid Democratic majority. It's not the kind of difference that will swing a presidential primary. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
