February 23, 2008
Campaign Season 7: Counting Cards
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO The Corner

Saturday, February 23
Peter — the wager

I still maintain that the Clintons (if she can squeak by in the next two primaries) will use every means to find a way to challenge, seat, or sway delegates to win the nomination, regardless of the aggregate popular vote or ongoing delegate count. While that may not work, I still think she will try if she wins Texas; and if she wins the last three states, it will work. Apparently Peter wants to suggest that the people of Florida and Michigan should be "disenfranchised" or that "undemocratic" caucuses in the night should weigh the same as the results of plebiscites, or that time-tested and loyal super-delegates should have their traditional roles neutered, or that tiny states that will not be in play or won't matter in the fall should count the same as CA, Fl, MI, NJ, NW, OH, TX, and PN.

I could con all that up in about ten seconds, so I'm sure the Clintons' team can do far better.

Friday, February 22
The Swooner-Crooner Election

I think what we are watching in the Democratic primary is historic. First, there has not been a candidate nominated for President more liberal than Barack Obama since George McGovern — not Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, or Kerry. This is unapologetic liberalism in the classic European-socialist sense, and for the first time in many years we will see its envisioned agendas without Clintonian trimming or apologetics — the flip side of the purist Goldwater in 1964. Obama will put the best face on this ultra-liberalism and the voters can freely decide. A real cut-and-dry choice.

Second, I don't think there has been this much acrimony for so long in a Democratic primary since the Humphrey campaign of 1968, much more venom than Kennedy-Carter in 1980 or Hart-Mondale in 1984. But more importantly, the fault-line this time is not ideological so much as personal, with ugly undertones that will be hard to heal, given there can't be horse-trading over policies. In the end, the Clintons are livid that the upstart Obama cut in front of the line and destroyed what was otherwise a near-decade long carefully planned and scripted return to power until 2016.

Third, the Clinton-Obama struggle is almost Sophoclean in its irony:

(a) African-Americans took Democrats at their word that race/gender identity politics and bloc voting in the 90 percentiles were essential, but may well have turned it on what would have been otherwise the first female presidential nominee and wife of the former "black" President;

(b) liberals are suddenly furious at the two-decade Clinton philosophy of justifying all actions as the necessary means to achieve a liberal end, and now will rethink the 1992-1998 notion of "Politics of Personal Destruction" in quite different terms;

(c) the nearly daily defections of delegates, legislators, and politicos from Hillary to Obama, in crass fashion of wanting to be on the side of the perceived winner, is cynical to the core but turned against the cynics par excellence of American politics;

(d) the old Clinton alliance of elites and minorities has been out-minoritied, out-hoped and out-elited by a completely fresh and unexpected candidate whose presence, carriage, and speaking ability even overshadow the now old-hat crooner Bill himself.

Everytime Bill talks about how Hillary gave up the fast line to do anti-poverty work, Michelle trumps him and points out the Harvard Law School Review editor gave up even more to go back to the south side of Chicago. Every time we see the full house on the table of the first woman candidate, the Obamas counter with a royal flush of the first black candidate. Everytime Hillary tries to talk black or Hispanic or give a belly laugh, Barack does it better in sort of Bing Crosby style. And Obama's hope has far more megatonnage than the old "the man from Hope" 1990s Clinton refrain.

And all the swooning and fainting at Obama rallies remind me of the 1944 Looney-Tunes Cartoon "Swooner-Crooner," about the chickens being wooed into stupor at first by the frenetic Frank Sinatra chicken — until out of nowhere a softer, more relaxed, and more laid-back, Bing Crosby type rooster appears, steals the audience, and out-sings the now has-been.

Thursday, February 21
It's Not Over Till It's Over...

Peter Robinson and I still have a bet about the efforts to which the Clintons will go to pull out the election.

We forget that even today, Sen. Clinton leads in both Ohio and Texas.

If she were to win both, and carry that momentum to Pennsylvania, again she will have won the key states in play in the November election — California, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. It would be no small thing to end the primary season with the biggest states and the most recent victories.

And if that were so (much of course would depend on the margin of victory), there is no reason to think that free-floating delegates could not be persuaded or coerced to her candidacy.

The swooning over Obama has a shelf life, and so far, incrementally, observers are beginning to see that there is not just rhetoric, but rhetoric sometimes at odds with reality: his often referenced Ivy-League student loans on examination are not proof of any hardship or unfairness; his 'reaching across the aisle' — in the manner of a much abused McCain — has no basis in fact, at least in the sense of major bipartisan-co-authored legislation in the Senate; and nothing in his campaign so far is any more or less civil than that of his rivals. His appeal remains his vigor, sense of character, and charisma and the implicit offer that America can finally redeem its past illiberality by courageously voting for an African-American candidate that will bring us together and make people like us abroad.

But I don't think that Americans will necessarily think voting for the more experienced McCain is in any way, shape, or form a referendum on their hopes or willingness to change or their racial sensitivity, but rather reflects a reluctance to turn the country over to someone with no executive experience and who has not completed a single term as U.S. Senator.

I think this will continue to drag on, and the wounds among Democrats will deepen and fester to the extent that the real question by June is not whether McCain's base will stay with him (it probably will), but how many scarred and hurt Democrats won't cross over to a perceived moderate.

Wednesday, February 20
Quotes of the Week

"To neutralize the support Ahmadinejad has domestically, we need to stop threatening and to get in a room with him," Samantha Power — advisor on foreign affairs to Sen. Barack Obama.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast."

Tuesday, February 19
Some 11th-Hour Advice to the Harvard Power Couple

Re: Michelle Obama's astounding admission that she hitherto had no reason to feel pride in the U.S., and Obama's supposed Biden-like lifting of a campaign refrain from someone else.

The problem is deeper than occasional slips. For most of the last 25 years the Obamas' contacts have been largely confined to universities (Occidental, Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, Chicago) as both students and employees, or to government-sponsored social agencies, or to the incestuous world of Chicago minority politics. These landscapes have proven liberal, sympathetic, and non-confrontational. I doubt very seriously in those environments that the Obamas have had any of their sometimes bewildering statements seriously cross-examined or questioned.

Michelle Obama, true, recites a litany of slights and grievances, but more likely she encountered highly educated white liberal audiences that were not about to cross her or challenge her assertions — a world away from steelworkers in Ohio, the Nascar crowd, the Mexican-Americans in LA, the hungry wolves of the D.C. press corps for whom controversy trumps even shared liberal ideology — or Clinton, Inc. for whom power, status, and adulation outweigh everything, including liberal head-nodding, white guilt, and identity politics.

The result is that finally out on the campaign trail both are beginning to enter an arena where most of America does not faint at an Obama rally, but resents deeply a candidate's spouse suggesting that she previously had no pride in her own country, and would think that generous college admission practices, scholarships, and loans were cause more for gratitude rather than resentment.

Some old cynical campaign veteran, cigar in mouth — a Tip O'Neill-type, with the more scars the better — should sit the two kids down, explain the no-holds-barred rules of the arena outside the university and liberal government agency, remind them that African-Americans and elite white liberals probably make up about at most a fourth of the electorate, and emphasize to them that by the public's own standard of living, the Obamas have been very privileged and done quite well — and that Michelle and Barack should start to say something uplifting other than the current mantra that the U.S. is a depressing and unfair place and has only one chance of 'hope" and "change" and "redemption" by allowing Barack and Michelle to lead us out of our collective ignorance.

Tuesday, February 19
Beyond Race and Gender?

This is apparently the Orwellian Democratic message to the white male:

If you're African-American, then it's OK that you express racial solidarity and vote for Sen. Obama by margins approaching 90 percent — while at the same time white males must prove that they are not racialists by having the courage to 'do the right thing' by likewise voting for an African-American. That apparently would make Michelle Obama proud of her country for the first time in her life.

If you vote for Hillary, likewise you transcend your gender and do the right thing — and so join the legion of feminists for whom her shared womanhood was their signature issue.

But if you were to vote for John McCain? You would, of course, reveal a tribal mentality by forgoing principle and obviously allying yourself along comfortable racial and gender lines.

Monday, February 18
Kept Hope Alive?

Re: "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is making a comeback." — Michelle Obama

I wrote not long ago that Michelle Obama is a loose cannon, and I fear that her latest is not her last. I would have thought that two Ivy-League degrees, a joint income of about a million dollars, exclusive private schools for the kids, and a nice home in the suburbs were not so bad and might suggest that hope had made a comeback well before Barack's presidential run.

Were Democrats fleeing the self-absorption of the Billary power couple of two Yale-educated lawyers — only to embrace the self-absorption of a power-couple of two Harvard-educated lawyers? Or was it a Yale versus Harvard Law School intramural thing all along?

Monday, February 18
Kosovo Was Then, This Is Now...

Quite apart from the undeniable merits of independence, in political terms Kosovo 2008 is not quite Kosovo of 1998. Let us count the post-9/11 ways:

1. The rise of radical Islam, especially in Europe, has made Western publics edgy about Muslim-identified states, especially inside Europe.

2. Russia is no longer a basket case, but rearming, aggressive, overflowing with petro-dollars, and eager to use oil — and more — as a weapon.

3. Milosevic is long dead.

4. For six years there has been a steady anti-American drumbeat in Europe and caricatures of the use of “preemption” and “unilateralism”; Euros have so turned off Americans that there is no support for reintervention to solve a “European” problem that should of course, if it worsens, be adjudicated at the Hague and other European Utopian agencies.

5. This was a Clinton thing, and predated George W. Bush. The current tension reminds us of our forgotten American Balkan presence, that seems to have been necessary for the past decade — and without a treaty no less! And did we ever ask Congress to bomb over there, or did we go to the sacrosanct U.N.? Suddenly there are few liberal Harry Reid/Nancy Pelosi talking points to be heard on Kosovo.

6. After Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no likelihood that Americans want a third war, especially for Kosovo. Can you imagine the E.U. begging the Texan, twangy Halliburtonite, bible-thumping George Bush to please do something now!? I imagine right now President Bush is getting a different sort of phone call from his European friends, “Yo George?”

7. Yet given NATO’s dismal performance in Afghanistan, it has little fides in the Balkans, and the American attitude might be ‘you didn’t want to fight much for Afghanistan, so why should we for Kosovo?’

8. There is some E.U. support, especially in Eastern Europe and among Orthodox and Greek-speaking communities, for Serbia. Perhaps unfaddish and most un-European, but support nonetheless.

Where does all this leave us? It might be a fine and noble thing for the Kosovars to have their own state like the rest of the regions of the former Yugoslavia. But let us pray that neither Serbia nor Russia calls the Western bluff about guaranteeing Kosovar autonomy, because in the present climate it really would be, well, a big fat bluff.