By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Last night, Hillary Clinton urged supporters to visit her Web site and let her know whether she should fight on or get out. I thought I’d take a look. As with any good Soviet-style election, you’re given two options:
Choices, choices …
The funniest thing about today’s lead Boston Globe headline is that it’s completely accurate.
I just sent off a piece to the Guardian on where the race goes from here. Despite some technical difficulties, it should be up in a bit.
Update: Well, this is annoying. I’m told that my deathless prose won’t go up until 5 p.m. or so due to computer issues. Since my stuff tends to have the shelf-life of day-old fish, I’m afraid it may be overtaken by events. So be it.
I can think of all sorts of reasons why Barack Obama shouldn’t make Hillary Clinton his running mate. She stands for what he was running against, she’s the most divisive politician in America, her husband is reckless, etc., etc. But I think he ought to suck it up and do it.
By running consistently ahead of Obama since — what? early March? — she has succeeded in forcing her way onto the ticket. It’s going to be very difficult to unite the party, and it’s got to gall Obama that it’s largely her fault. Tough. Putting her on the ticket creates some problems, but it solves more.
OK, time to hit the cable nets.
Trying to make sense of Hillary Clinton’s truly bizarre reference to Robert Kennedy’s assassination? Good luck. The New York Times’ Katharine Seelye put up a comprehensive blog post last night that’s full of insight — yet she can’t seem to make sense of it, either.
Seelye seems to accept Clinton’s explanation that she was referring merely to the fact that the Democratic primaries had extended into June in 1968, and that she was not trying to suggest that, well, gee, maybe Barack Obama will get shot just like Kennedy, so she ought to stick around.
Yet Seelye also opens her post by referring to Friday as possibly “one of the worst days of Senator Hillary Clinton’s political career.” And she closes by wondering whether Clinton’s remarks were so toxic that she may have even alienated those who want to help her find “a graceful way out” of the presidential race.
Perhaps most telling, Seelye embeds a lengthy commentary by Keith Olbermann that is, as she says, “tough beyond measure.” Suffice it to say that Olbermann does not give Clinton the benefit of the doubt as to whether she had deliberately evoked Kennedy’s assassination.
Personally, I’m not sure what to think. Like Seelye, I believe Clinton was trying to make a point about the timing, not the assassination. But her remarks were tasteless and grotesque nevertheless. This may be one of those situations in which what Clinton was trying to say is being deliberately distorted, and she deserves it.
I appeared on New England Cable News earlier today to talk about the presidential race.
The quick pundit take seems to be that Hillary Clinton vowed to fight and fight and fight some more, all the way to Barack Obama’s inauguration next January and perhaps into his second term as well. But I thought I heard something else. Check this out, from her victory speech in West Virginia tonight:
And our nominee will be stronger for having campaigned long and hard, building enthusiasm and excitement, hearing your stories, and answering your questions. And I will work my heart out for the nominee of the Democratic Party to make sure we have a Democratic president.
No, she’s not giving up. Yes, she told her supporters that she still thinks she can win. But she’s obviously not stupid. She can do the math, even if Mark Penn can’t. This brief acknowledgment of reality means something.
In my latest for the Guardian, I ponder Ted Kennedy’s decision to throw Hillary Clinton over the side of the yacht last week — a far more significant move than his endorsement of Barack Obama earlier this year.
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that Hillary Clinton has finally reached the end of the media road. The new narrative isn’t that she’s losing, but that she’s lost, and that the only thing reporters want to know now is when she’ll get out.
I made similar points this morning on New England Cable News.
Well, that’s what I ended up going with when I wrote my Guardian column last night. Clinton did really well, so there’s no reason for her to get out. But she didn’t win by the huge margin she needed to change the dynamic of the race. And on (and on) we go.
Good grief. I’ve got to write something up for the Guardian in a few hours, and, right now, it looks like Pennsylvania’s going to count for nothing. Clinton is probably going to win by a blah margin — say, six or eight points. That’s enough for her to keep going, but not enough for her to have a realistic chance of winning the nomination, or to refill her depleted campaign coffers.
Here’s a theory. It strikes me that, over the last month, increasing numbers of Democrats have decided that Clinton has a better chance than Obama does of beating McCain in the fall. Yet it’s almost certainly too late for Clinton, and no one knows what to do about it. Thus we go on and on and on, and no one can say how it will end.
Mostly I’ve been watching MSNBC. Now Tim Russert and Harold Ford are drawing a line in the sand in Indiana. If Obama wins Indiana, it’s over. Unless it isn’t, of course.