AN ELECTION TO LOSE

Paul Krugman makes economics understandable since he writes well and understands the subject. When it comes to politics he is less convincing as he demonstrates in his article Divided they Stand, in The New York Times. On the face of things, much like politics really, this is somewhat surprising. I suppose that good political analysis might not be as dispassionate as economics might be, and should not be because economic policy impacts on people. Political analysis requires a consideration and investigation of motivations, which of course should be rational, but often do not seem to be, a principle that applies generally and not just to the citizens of Kansas.

He is correct that Obama will be nominated, since he will end up with the majority of the pledged delegates, which presumably makes him preferred by the state by state decision makers who took part in the primaries. It is also true that both Florida and Michigan are likely to be important states in deciding the outcome of the presidential election, and that Obama has not the same on the ground presence there that he has in other states in which he has participated in state-wide elections and caucuses. In the electoral contest again McCain, who apparently is more formidable than I give him credit, he will have to rely on the Democratic Party machine.

Clinton’s behavior is not as neutral as Krugman imagines it to be, both in regard to her reference to the assassination of RFK and her earlier praise of Johnson over Martin Luther King. The explanation might be that Clinton is an inexperienced political campaigner and the long campaign is taking its toil, as suggested by Juan Cole. But these color purple issues were introduced by Clinton, one supposes consciously, and generously unconsciously. Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch, for example, is trenchant:

Ever since she realized back in early March that Obama was going to take the nomination Hillary Clinton’s long-term strategy has been to do her best to ensure McCain will win this November so she can become the Democratic nominee in 2012. But she had a short term strategy too and on Friday she deliberately made it explicit in a newspaper office in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. There she suggested that someone is likely to step up to the plate and assassinate Barack Obama in the waning moments of the California primary, just as Bobby Kennedy was forty years go almost to the day. The wish is mother to the deed. If anything does happen to Obama in California Mrs Clinton should surely be indicted as a co-conspirator.

How to else construe her grotesque remarks in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in the editorial offices of the Argus Leader newspaper. Here she told the editors, “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said, dismissing calls to drop out.

There is no other way to construe these sentences, not thrown over her shoulder on a campaign walk, but delivered in measured tones to the Argus-Leader editorial board, but to interpret them as Mrs Clinton’s more or less explicit statement that she is spending a million a day just to keep her hat in the ring because Obama might well get killed. Then, just like the scenario at the end of the Manchurian candidate, Hillary will straddle Obama’s bleeding body, make the speech of her life and become the assured nominee.

Not so polite and measured as Paul Krugman, who may have fallen victim to the house style. There is evidence that Clinton’s sense of victimhood is shared by many of her female supporters, reported elsewhere in The New York Times. In a story on the declining fortunes of Oprah Winfrey, reporter Edward Wyart, notes:

Her endorsement of the presidential bid of Senator Barack Obama appears to have alienated some of the middle-aged white women who make up the bulk of her television audience, many of whom support Senator Hillary Clinton.
. . .Since the endorsement, however, angry criticism of her political stance became a regular feature of the message boards on Oprah.com, Ms. Peck said. “There are a lot of her fans who are not Democrats or who support Hillary Clinton who feel betrayed,” she added.

Paul Krugman in his piece does not recognize how deeply the issues of gender and race cut. Obama, I am guessing really needs to address this issue, and he went some way by mentioning the country his daughters would grew up in. He might do that by selecting a woman vice presidential candidate. American women are not seeing Clinton as the groundbreaker who has shown it possible to be a serious presidential candidate, as Jesse Jackson did for Afro-Americans.

However Obama cannot select Clinton for this role. Presidential historian David Kruger has the dope:

Whatever one’s opinion of Lyndon Johnson–and to me his Presidency will always be one more piece of evidence that the Vice-Presidency is the weak spot of the American Constitution, despite some great achievements–one cannot help but sympathize with his anger and respect his calculations. Although RFK still referred to him as “Johnson” and to his late brother as “the President,” Bundy was right. The United States has only one President at a time. To have chosen Robert Kennedy would have divided the loyalties of all the key cabinet members, such as Robert McNamara, whom Johnson had decided to keep. It would have given the whole enormous Kennedy entourage access the deepest councils of the Adminstration, and made RFK the automatic heir apparent whenver LBJ should step down. It was a choice that he simply could not make, and in July, he publicly pulled the plug by announcing, after a private meeting with RFK, that no cabinet member would be chosen as Vice President.

Exactly the same calculations apply this year for Barack Obama. In choosing Hillary he would be holding out his hand not only to her, but also to all the Clinton veterans and acolytes who counted on her to return them to power as well. He would not, to put it bluntly, be master in his own Administration. He would be much better advised to choose one of the Governors who supported her, like Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania–or perhaps one of his other defeated rivals like Chris Dodd or Joe Biden (John Edwards, in my opinion, has had his chance.) He might well offer Clinton the next opening on the Supreme Court, a post in which I think she would do well. But the chance that she could be Vice President is nil, all the more so after her appalling remark.

It is curious that a good economist is not also a good political commentator. There are perhaps advantages in writing for a number of publications, so that you are not subject to the house frame on events. A consensus view almost never does justice to what is at play. Krugman fails to see how Clinton is acting in way, perhaps calculatedly, to be destructive. Whatever politics is it is not merely the facade, and nor is entirely rational conscious calculation, it also includes the shadows and the nightmares, the past and the future.

ELSEWHERE:

Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post on 22 May(via Truthdig) called the Clinton campaign’s strategy.

WASHINGTON—Commentators trying to discern the Hillary Clinton campaign’s endgame strategy have posited any number of wheels-within-wheels scenarios worthy of a spy novel. The simple truth has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with instinct: Keep moving forward until you drop.

It’s not that she’s making a calculated play for the vice presidency or trying to set herself up for another campaign in 2012 or 2016. To those who know her, it’s that she really wants to be president, and that she has come tantalizingly close, and that she’s going to keep moving toward that goal even if there’s no obvious way to reach it. At this point, her campaign is about getting to tomorrow, and then getting to the next day, and then getting to the day after that.

He then goes on to deflate the logic of the popular vote notion that Clinton is putting around. Still the question is why, and even today I notice in The Sydney Morning Herald, her husband staying that she has been unfairly treated and she is only candidate that can win. These are not normal folks, but are they psychological pathological?

This is in effect, in my opinion, a very divisive strategy, with the effect of harming the prospects of the Democratic nominee. For that reason, the superdelegates will not support, and will not support in the numbers that Clinton needs. Still Clinton’s erstwhile supporters older women are going to have a sense of grievance, rather than positive sense that women can win the top job, and the electoral measures required for wider representation of women. I do not get it, but I try to understand what these woman feel. The greater the expectation and closer the contest the greater the disappointment. Clinton will not acknowledge her failings. It might be observed that Obama is the only Afro-American, or as the Oregonian wrote biracial, representative in the Senate since Edmund Brooke of Massachusetts’s.

When it is over, people are going to be questioning whether there are ways to improve the primary process, and indeed whether there are alternative democratic selection processes. I do not understand why Florida and Michigan went ahead with their primaries, and the Oregon legislature by contrast put their’s back.