Quote Of The Day: On The Clintons And Negative Campaigning

Is the Pennsylvania primary vote only about that primary? Or is more — even more than who gets the Democratic nomination — at stake? Andrew Sullivan writes in his latest newspaper column:

Even after all the hype, this week’s vote in Pennsylvania will be a watershed primary election.

This isn’t because it could determine whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues on its brutal, nihilistic path towards the destruction of the most promising figure in the Democratic Party since Kennedy.

It isn’t because it’s been an age since the last primary vote and every nasty toxin in American culture has been drawn to the surface by the Clinton poultice.

It isn’t even because Pennsylvania is an indisputably important and large state that any Democrat needs to win in November.

It is because the Clintons have turned Pennsylvania into a microcosm of what they think the general election will be in November.

And the Clintons are running as the Rove Republicans. If they fail to destroy Barack Obama as effectively as Karl Rove — George W. Bush’s master of the dark arts — destroyed Al Gore and John Kerry in 2000 and 2004, with tactics just as brutal but even more personal, then they will have driven American politics to a critical point. They will have shown that the paradigm that has reigned in US politics for at least two decades has been shattered.

That’s what is being tested this week. It may be the most important vote in America until the final one, in November.

Obama has been pummeled by a Democrat in ways never witnessed in a primary campaign.

And further down:

Clinton, who had a 20-point lead until recently, should win Pennsylvania easily. But if Obama keeps her lead to single digits, if the momentum of the race does not change, that will show something else. It will show that the crisis the US is in now has made the kind of tactics of the past two decades moot. It will show that the issues of the Iraq occupation, the teetering economy, the unsustainable debt and the collapsing dollar are more salient than cultural identity. It will show that the voters want to debate something more than lapel pins.

(Speaking of lapel pins, NOTE THIS…)

It will show we are in a new era.

Maybe we’re not. Maybe the old politics and the old patterns have one more turn of the screw to go. That’s the beauty of democracy. This week we will go a long way towards finding out.

Read it in its entirety.

FOOTNOTE: What is striking is that for years many Democrats have decried Rovian tactics, and some had suggested that in 2008 voters in primaries and the general election would sweep this kind of politics away with a big broom and start new era.

But now seems as if some Democrats really never objected to the ethics and political morality of these tactics: they objected to the fact Republicans could use the tactics of demonization and seek-and-destroy politics better than they could.

The politics of personal destruction is now embraced and practiced by those who once passionately decried the politics of personal destruction. If the tactics succeed, then that’s the way the game will be increasingly played in the 21st century — with future candidates raising (or perhaps more accurately, lowering) the bar.