Bill and Hillary's Unexcellent Adventure

Hillary’s Clinton’s campaign has been losing altitude faster than the Hindenburg after it caught fire. Watching the Clinton’s crash and burn has become a national spectator sport fed by the media’s lust to cover the former First Couple’s fabulous flameout. Hillary is going from heir apparent to political has been faster than you can say “Bush/Clinton/Bush Clinton.”

That’s right, a Bush or a Clinton has been on the presidential ballot for the last twenty-eight years. I’m convinced that nominating Hillary is the best chance Republicans have of avoiding the comeuppance they so richly deserve. For years the Clinton’s biggest selling point was the sympathy vote they got from standing up to their political enemies. Now, however, the Clinton’s are in the perverse position of standing a good chance of handing their political enemies a victory if they resort to scorched earth tactics to defeat Obama for the Democratic nomination. Put simply, if Bill and Hillary lose at the polls but then try and snatch the nomination by relying on super delegates and other shenanigans at the convention, then they’ll fracture the party and hand the election to John McCain.

Hillary is losing to Obama for a variety of reasons. Obama is a better candidate. His campaign is better-organized and well run than hers. And voters are finding Obama more authentic than the seemingly ever-calculating Clinton. For instance, every time Hillary has to defend her decision authorizing the disastrous war in Iraq she sounds like an unprincipled politician who can’t bring herself to admit a mistake. Her answer is so formulated – “if I knew then what I know now” – that everyone recognizes it as the ultimate copout to cover a catastrophic misjudgment.

Voters are finding Obama’s clarity – he opposed the war from the very beginning – far more preferable than Clinton’s cloudy obfuscation. After all, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor might also say: “if I knew then what I know now I wouldn’t have cast the deciding ballot that installed Bush/Cheney over the will of the electorate.” But that hardly mitigates the fact that she made a horrendous decision.

There’s not much daylight between Obama and Hillary policy wise, so voters are going with the personality they prefer. Obama represents not just change, but also transcendence in the sense of America regaining and living up to the ideals that make the United States a great country. Hillary, on the other hand, has a proven track record of being a polarizing figure. In many ways, she’s a mirror image of George W. Bush, even if she on the other side of the political spectrum. For instance, both Bush and Hillary exhibit a pathological degree of self-certainty, a congenital unwillingness to concede mistakes, and an attitude that politics is always a zero-sum game.

There are a lot of Republicans and moderates that are looking to punish the Republicans this November. Their distaste for Hillary Clinton, however, may overcome their anger at the GOP, particularly given the fact that no one doubts John McCain’s emotional authenticity. Of course, revulsion at the Bush administration may be so high that even Hillary (a candidate with negative ratings approaching 50%) could squeak by in the general election. However, at this stage Hillary is faced with a daunting if not impossible challenge: how to beat Obama without alienating a coalition made up of traditional Democrats, new voters, independents, and moderate Republicans that see in Obama a breath of fresh political air. Paradoxically, Hillary is now in the unenviable position whereby she can only win the nomination by resorting to tactics that will doom the Democrats in November.

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