Hope or High Water

As an Obama supporter, I have often been discouraged by Senator Clinton’s refusal to drop out of a contest that she has little chance of winning. In a post before the March 4th Texas primary and caucus, I wrote that she should drop out on March 5th. I still believe that if Clinton were going drop out, that would have been the appropriate date, but that time has long passed, and the new reality is that unless Obama wins in Pennsylvania, the race will continue into June. And well it should. The new frame among democrats is to play this race out until every vote is counted, and I tend to agree, though my motives are far from clandestine.

The longer Hillary Clinton stays in the presidential contest, the more she loses standing among prominent democrats. The longer she stays in the race, the more she validates the meme that the Clinton’s care more about themselves than they do about the good of the party or the good of the nation. I am not saying that this meme is true, I am simply saying that the perception of Mrs. Clinton is shifting, and more people will believe that she is self-serving as the contest progresses.  As the Clinton campaign inches closer to completing its implosion the more desperate Hillary becomes. The tax records, the lying about “sniper fire,” telling Bill Richardson that Obama can’t win in November — these are the missteps of a campaign in crisis. I say let Mrs. Clinton keep on going, let her credibility worsen, the democratic party can only grow stronger. Clinton is seriously hurting her chances of gaining the role of Senate Majority Leader if Obama wins the election. The tide of the democratic party is shifting, the younger voters want no more Democratic Leadership Council (i.e. republican-lite) nonsense running the party of reform. I say good riddance.

Mark Penn, up until he was demoted yesterday from his position as Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, serves to underscore my point. Penn also works for a large lobbying group that was hired by the Columbian government to help broker a free trade agreement between the United States and Columbia. Penn spent last weekend in Columbia working for the Columbian government on policy which challenges the policy that Hillary Clinton champions. At first, the Clinton campaign said that they didn’t see a conflict of interests between Penn as a lobbyist an Penn as a strategist, before finally demoting him from his position. Penn’s microtargeting approach is one of the primary reasons why Clinton has not met expectations, he should have been fired long ago, but even after this total lack of judgment, Clinton still refuses to release Penn from the campaign. The Clintons care about loyalty the same way George W. Bush cares about loyalty, and as we have learned from these past eight years, placing loyalty above the best interests of your campaign is not admirable, it is conceded and the wrong path for any democrat.

So let us embrace Clinton’s campaign, she can do little but quicken the demise of a branch of democrats (see: Lieberman) we should have buried years ago.