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How Hillary failed Sunday, Jun 15, 2008 By John Brummett People have been asking. So how did Hillary Clinton manage to lose? Bear in mind that the following analysis comes from one who thought, as did she, that her nomination was inevitable. And that was part of her problem. It seems to come down to four factors: 1. She thought her name and celebrity and momentum would win it for her by Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, and did not have a plan for caucuses and primaries after that. So when Barack Obama almost split with her Feb. 5, mainly by pulling out Missouri on the late urban vote, she was in trouble. She effectively lost the nomination the next few weeks, getting beaten badly and in succession in Oregon, Washington, Maryland, Virginia and Wisconsin. She got her stuff together for Ohio and Texas and thereafter, but it was too late. And those late wins in West Virginia and Kentucky were meaningless. White rural voters were simply recoiling against Obama over that preacher and the rest, and she was the only immediately available option. Democratic super-delegates weren't going to reverse an earned lead in delegates by an African-American. They simply couldn't. 2. Obama just flat-out beat her in three key categories, making it all the more remarkable that she was as close as she was. He availed himself of the modern Internet to raise more money than she. His campaign out-strategized and out-organized hers. And he presented a compelling presence. She didn't. She lacks a natural warmth in a campaign setting. She is less generally likable than he. His rhetoric soars; hers has a tendency to grate. 3. Her message and her essence were wrong for the occasion. Her stressing experience and insider know-how came off a bit like Michael Dukakis saying the 1988 election was about competence, not ideology. Wrong. It turned out to be about Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance and fear - a fate, by the way, that perhaps awaits Obama. Moveon.org, which generated a veritable cascade of dollars for Obama, was not interested in competence and insider know-how from a senator who had made a political calculation to support initially the war in Iraq. It was interested in punishing her for that and in supporting the candidate who was the likeliest to get us out quickest. 4. Clinton Fatigue cannot be discounted. It was not any one thing, but a synthesis. Some were tired of swapping out the presidency among Bushes and Clintons. Others were sick of Bill and made sicker of him by his nonsense on the campaign trail. Others just didn't like Hillary. Key insiders in Washington had always thought the Clintons were too much about themselves and not enough about the party and the cause, which was quite true. So, as soon as Obama put up a fight, they flocked to him. Take my personal example. Having suffered from one of the first known cases of Clinton Fatigue, contracted in 1987, I spent months extolling Hillary's inevitability and trying to sidle up to her and make up with her. But then the moment that Obama began to give her a fight, I said to heck with that - I gotta be me. ------- 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. |
