POLITICS: The end of Hillary’s Campaign
Mar 28th, 2008 by azdean
Peggy Noonan’s column today in the Wall Street Journal is about Hillary’s “Bosnia” story, but it struck me more as the marking point of the end of her campaign. Hilary has lost to Obama. The Rev. Wright story didn’t turn the tide and now even her supporters are realizing that her campaign “doesn’t seem to be working”. More and more Democrats will be calling for her to withdrawal from the race (as Pat Leahy did today). Hillary is losing her grip on the party and they are wanting to end this mess. I’m beginning to wonder if she’ll even make it to the Pennsylvania primary on April 22nd. Once things unravel, they tend to unravel quickly. The Clintons have a habit of clinging and fighting on, but she’s at the end of her rope on this one.
What do you think?
Getting Mrs. Clinton, by Peggy Noonan
I think we’ve reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don’t. There’s no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don’t. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don’t, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will.
[...]
I sat next to a woman, a New York Democrat who’d been for Hillary from the beginning and still was. She was here. But, she said, “It doesn’t seem to be working.” She shrugged, not like a brokenhearted person but a practical person who’d missed all the signs of something coming. She wasn’t mad at the voters. But she was no longer so taken by the woman who soon took the stage and enacted joy.
The other day a bookseller told me he’d been reading the opinion pages of the papers and noting the anti-Hillary feeling. Two weeks ago he realized he wasn’t for her anymore. It wasn’t one incident, just an accumulation of things. His experience tracks this week’s Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showing Mrs. Clinton’s disapproval numbers have risen to the highest level ever in the campaign, her highest in fact in seven years.
You’d think she’d pivot back to showing a likable side, chatting with women, weeping, wearing the bright yellows and reds that are thought to appeal to her core following, older women. Well, she’s doing that. Yet at the same time, her campaign reveals new levels of thuggishness, though that’s the wrong word, for thugs are often effective. This is mere heavy-handedness.
[...]
What, really, is Mrs. Clinton doing? She is having the worst case of cognitive dissonance in the history of modern politics. She cannot come up with a credible, realistic path to the nomination. She can’t trace the line from “this moment’s difficulties” to “my triumphant end.” But she cannot admit to herself that she can lose. Because Clintons don’t lose. She can’t figure out how to win, and she can’t accept the idea of not winning. She cannot accept that this nobody from nowhere could have beaten her, quietly and silently, every day. (She cannot accept that she still doesn’t know how he did it!)
