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(Updated) Welcome To The Clinton Pity Party

Posted by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist in At TMV.
Feb 10th, 2008 | Comments

That sound you hear is all the whinging and spinning going on at the Hillary Clinton pity party.

Negative spin — which is to say lowering expectations — has become an integral part of any smart political campaign, but the hankie wringing on behalf of a candidate who supposedly had the nomination wrapped up before the first primary vote was cast is extraordinary.

This is because she is so not out of the race at this point that it’s sheer folly to suggest that she is.

Clinton’s handlers said that she expected to lose the caucuses in Washington state and Nebraska, as well as the Louisiana primary, to Barack Obama yesterday, which she indeed did although by larger margins than expected, as Obama further closed the delegate gap.

But now those handlers are saying that the rest of the February primaries — including the 238-delegate Potomac Primary on Tuesday involving Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia — all favor Obama.

Now how can this be?

How can the handlers for a candidate who had the race by the short and curlies only a few weeks ago be conceding a region that is chockablock with Clinton’s core constituents — women, Latinos and lower-income Democrats — while saying that she will rebound in March and everything will be okey-dokey?

Negative spin.

While Obama leads in the Potomac Primary polls, they have been notoriously unreliable this campaign season, and Virginia especially seems less than a slam-dunk for him. In the end, there may be a very simple explanation for why the MSM seems so receptive to the negative spin:

Many reporters and editors live in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs of Washington and many of them and their friends are going to vote for Obama. So there!

The Clinton campaign leaves nothing to chance. The negative spin is as finely scripted as is time the candidate is to spend shaking hands or shedding tears. But have we entered the realm of self-fulfilling prophecy and Clinton is in genuinely big trouble even with those much yakked about superdelegates?

After reading this dispatch I have to wonder what the heck is going on:

“The Clinton camp hopes to stop the Obama bandwagon by winning Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4, after which Mrs Clinton is planning to call on party grandees including Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives and Harry Reid, the party’s leader in the Senate, to persuade Mr Obama to stand down.”

The notion that Clinton believes she can snap her fingers and everything will suddenly fall into place seems preposterous given that we are in the midst of the most exciting Democratic primary race since forever and caving in is not in the Obama lexicon.

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elrod

Her "Wait for OH and TX" strategy actually has a name. It's called the Rudy Giuliani strategy. It worked wonders for Rudy when he waited in Florida for the "real voters" to come out for him. He knew that his base was waiting to turn the momentum to him in Florida as his rivals beat each other up in IA, NH and SC. He knew the demographics worked against him in those earlier states but it didn't matter because the delegate total from Florida was worth more than those three states combined. It was a wonderful strategy: lie in wait and pounce when the calender came to Florida. Oh wait. It didn't exactly work out that way. But don't worry, Hillary. I'm sure voters and OH and TX are paying no attention to what voters at this late stage in primaries are thinking elsewhere. I'm sure they're immune to "momentum" and will go just as the demographics say they should. I mean, Rudy thought so too...

calmdogs

I am sure you could have found a more unflattering photo of Hillary if you had tried just a bit harder.

Jammer

'sigh' Shaun, this article does nothing to advance our national discourse or the prospects of Democrats this fall. Why is it the Republicans can fight it out without each denigrating the other, but Dems are at each others throats? How can you not understand that there were a lot of excited people about the possibility of a woman president long before Obama got into this campaign? How can you not understand that the prospects of Democrats in the fall depends in large part on the supporters of each candidate not denigrating the others, or offering snarky articles on one candidate? The forces of Obama seem not to have any idea how to win without also trying to tear down and destroy their opponent and castigating her supporters. I see this all over the blogosphere. You all think you can be as snarky and nasty to Clinton as you want, and you are in the process really really starting to make her supporters mad and they are not an insignificant number of people. This will not turn out well until the supporters of the candidate of hope and unity figure out how to actually campaign on hope and unity.

I look to Bill Maher as the kind of Obama supporter I respect and admire. He supports Obama but says: if you hate Clinton thats your problem, because she hasnt done anything to deserve it. That kind of comment helps to advance our national discourse, and the hopes of all Dems in the fall.

GeorgeSorwell

Wow--if the Democrats keep looking for a way to blow it, they''re gonna find it!!

casualobserver

I've got to imagine more than a few of these superdelegates rose to influence/leadership positions during the first Clinton administration.

Perhaps the former President would be more useful to his spouse's campaign just working the backroom reminding these people of that.

Then, as long as HRC can keep the regular delegate count within 100 and make sure she takes the last couple of primaries (through flexing th organizational muscle into those states) to claim "momentum shift", she can dipense with these upstart Obamacons.

Donna Brazile better watch her mouth. What other party needs her losing touch.......the Paulloons?

shaun

Jammer:

Shooting the messenger will not get you one bit closer to The Promised Land. You should be addressing your national discourse issues with the campaigns, not a blogger who is merely conveying the situation as it exists.

Marsh

This is disappointing. In the past I looked forward to reading the posts here and it was usually my first stop in my nightly blog runs. Unfortunately there have been too many anti-Hillary posts lately but that's certainly within the sites prerogative. Fairness and accuracy may be a bit too much to ask this election season.

It's unfortunate you chose this picture. There's a huge difference between pity and tears of nostalgia and I think you know better so I'm going to assume the picture was for effect. I'll let Kathleen Hall Jamieson explain it to you.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: ... .. One of the things I think that happens with many of these visual depictions is that the people who are producing them are trying to attach what scholars call negative affect to Hillary Clinton. And I know that's an odd concept for non-academics.

BILL MOYERS: Negative?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Affect. To the extent that you have negative feelings, have basic affect when you see something. If I can attach that to something, I can make you feel uneasy about it. I can increase the likelihood that you're going to vote against Hillary Clinton. So we know, for example, that if I show you a picture of someone who's smiling and feels comfortable ... ..

BILL MOYERS: Right.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: You think more positively of the person, even if you don't know who the person is. Then I show you a scary picture, an off-putting picture. You react negatively. You respond negatively. I can increase the likelihood that you'll say you'll vote against that person even if you know nothing about them. ... ..

JSpencer

I look forward to the day when we have a woman president in this country, and I hope it happens in my lifetime, but none of us ought to allow sex or race in itself to become the deciding factor when choosing a candidate, regardless of how much we may think it's overdue. Candidates should be considered based on their records, on their policies, on their vision for the country, and definitely on their integrity. Let's please leave sex and race a bit lower on the list when making such an important decision. Think of that particular aspect as frosting... rather than cake.

shaun

Marsh:

Your comingling of "fairness and accuracy" with what you perceive to be an anti-Clinton bias is precious.

I cannot speak for other co-bloggers, but I call them as I see them. This has included numerous posts noting that until very recently Obama was failing to put flesh on the bones of his hope-and-change mantra, as well as posts in praise of McCain. Bottom line: Catagorizing me is hopeless.

Hillary Clinton, with the help of a man I consider to be the finest politician of the modern age and the best campaign managers that money can buy, has crafted a kind of campaign that to her horror many Democrats and Independents simply are not buying into in 2008.

That campaign, from the tears on command to the ongoing flip-flopping on the Iraq war, would have being doing spectacularly if it weren't for the fact that she has a challenger who would seem to represent everything that she does not. That candidate just happens to be Barack Obama.

As I noted in a reply to Jammer, you need to ask the Clinton campaign why things are so screwed up. Shooting the messenger won't get you any answers.

Your response?

cosmoetica

Listen, I've disagreed with Shaun in past threads on many issues, but to somehow impute, as Marsh does, that he is piling on to a Hillary bashing is ludicrous.

Hill has handlers, and it is THEY, not any journalist (even the guy who accurately called Chelsea's handling being pimped, which is merely the youthful way of saying 'being used') who is in control of the spin.

Funny how a woman who decries sexism benefits from it whenever she does not get her way- from the crying incident to the faux 'I'm a mom' BS over Chelsea, to this pity poor me act. Imagine any male candidate doing the same and not being ridiculed out of the race.

And I won't even get into their not so subtle attempts at niggerizing Obama.

DLS

Rudy Giuliani strategy

No -- Clinton has been in every primary and caucus, unlike Giuliani.

In fact, that cheatin' witch even put her name on the ballot in Michigan even though the election there was held too early, against Dem Party rules.

* * *

"could have found a more unflattering photo"

Shaun has done that before; he used the Drudge photo, if I recall correctly. There's nothing wrong with this photo or the one he used at that time.

* * *

"The forces of Obama seem not to have any idea how to win without also trying to tear down and destroy their opponent and castigating her supporters. ... if you hate Clinton thats your problem, because she hasnt done anything to deserve it."

It's the Clinton campaign that has been aggressive and low toward Obama, not the opposite; Clinton has done plenty to deserve criticism and contempt. Not just this year but of course back in the 1990s.

Marsh

Thanks Shaun but I'll pass on any further comments. There is no point in carrying this conversation any further - perhaps another time. Too many people have forgotten what civil discourse is and only see one way to win - I'm not one of them.

I'll be voting on the issues this year and who I think will be the best candidate.

DLS

Pity -- ha. They can appeal to the emotions of Dim-wit voters all they way, but they're an ugly, power-hungry bunch. And smart people expect them to force Clinton before the voters, rather than Obama. And now Dean is talking about making some kind of "arrangement." Is Dean working with thumb-breakers?

[Comments are good]

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/richard_ada...

DLS

Even before polls opened Tuesday, Hillary Clinton was all but calling electoral fraud, pre-emptively urging supporters to report irregularities. Ironically, the only campaign committing them was her own.

Which was evident enough when daughter Chelsea Clinton was caught trying to campaign at a Connecticut polling place. ...

...the campaign urged all Hillary supporters to be vigilant for signs of fraud and to duly report them — to Clinton's own campaign instead actual electoral authorities.

Like anything else the Clintons do, this was a setup to make the results debatable. Clinton's internal polls reportedly were suggesting that her campaign wasn't likely to do all that well — as Tuesday's results later showed.

It's a loser's tactic and, combined with a Clintonian willingness to violate electoral norms, it doesn't paint a pretty picture. It's part of a larger picture of a willingness to cut corners on elections as long as it serves the senator's purpose.

If Hillary is so concerned about electoral law irregularities, the first place she ought to go looking for them is in her own campaign.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcon...

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