In the wake of what her most loyal backers and most imaginative spinners can only call a massive defeat, New York Senator Hillary Clinton now faces a dilemma not faced by any Democrat who has come before her.
It’s best summarized by the New York Post’s Washington D.C. bureau chief Charles Hurt:
It’s certainly conceivable that Clinton can go on to stage a dramatic comeback in New Hampshire just as her husband did in 1992, forever billing him the “Comeback Kid.” She maintains a solid lead there.
But the same dynamics that worked in Iowa are now at work in New Hampshire.
Carrying high the flag of “change,” Obama will again attract all those people who are just sick and tired everybody in Washington. Add to the mix that Clinton goes there as a fallen star and Obama goes there as a rock star.
The problem with caressing the jewels of the crown before the coronation is that it’s really embarrassing when it turns out that the coronation goes to someone else.
Clinton’s invincibility has turned into inadequacy. She stumbled from Almighty to also-ran.
The only question that remains now is whether she will be able to recover enough to go on.
But does she really want to spend the rest of her viable political career on the national stage tearing down the man who is poised to become America’s real first black president?
Just look at some of her options. She can:
—Go after Obama and hope to defeat him on the issues. That also would require a true passion to checkmate his passion. Does she have it?
–Use opposition research if her organization can get it. In this day of nonstop news-cycles, news organizations asking tough questions, and bloggers who suspect any question, even a candidate’s statement about his/her birthday it’s a double-edged sword.
–Use surrogates to go after Obama and try to raise his negatives. But if you look at what happened in Iowa, you have to conclude BEEN THERE/DONE THAT. People associated with her campaign are widely suspected of having intentionally harped on Obama’s admitted youthful drug use to reporters and repeatedly-mentioning his Muslim links in tactics that had a fetid Rovian reek to many.
Moreover, by all accounts Obama did hugely well with women, independent voters and young people. Clinton can try to (a) win these groups over (b) raise his negatives so they don’t like Obama.
But if she spends the next few months NOT talking issues, NOT being passionate, NOT focusing on what she offers American in the future and if she OR her surrogates spend their time trying to politically dismember Obama, she could lose a lot of passionate voters on Election Day who will never forgive her.
Her dilemma. On the issues? Or find a way to go negative. But is it wise to find a way to go negative — even if it was via supporters who were basically surrogates? Mainstream media, new media and voters are too sophisticated in 21st-Century America to not see the likely source. Clinton has enormous money and organization but the betting is it’ll move like a tsunami now to Obama.
You could argue that Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee got away with or even benefited from his unusual pulling of the anti-Romney ad which he then showed to reporters. But then the Clinton camp lost support when its supporters went personally negative on Obama — and got a resounding answer on Election Day when women, independent voters and young people cast votes for issue-oriented politics and against the politics of polarization that have poisoned American discourse in recent years.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.