This will most likely be my last anti-Hillary Clinton post.
As I wrote earlier this month, Obama will clinch a pledged delegate victory tonight in Oregon which will render Sen. Clinton even more irrelevant than she has been for the past two weeks. When we wake up on Wednesday morning, as Obama supporters, there will no longer be a need to worry about Hillary Clinton. The focus will be squarely on John McCain and the Republican Party.
By now we all know the magic number of delegates required to win the Democratic Nomination is 2,025, but with 798 superdelegates factored into that number, the magic number of pledged delegates is 1,627. Obama enters tonight's contests in Oregon and Kentucky with 1,610.5 pledged or elected delegates.
With 103 pledged delegates at stake tonight Clinton would need to win 83% of them in order to put off the inevitable until the 1st of June in Puerto Rico. Given Oregon's vote-by-mail system, chances are there have already been enough ballots cast to give Obama the 17 remaining elected delegates he needs to clinch.
After Oregon, Clinton's only possible path to the nomination will have to include either the unelected superdelegates overruling the will of the elected delegates or Clinton somehow managing to get the Democratic Party to suddenly change the method for keeping score after the game has already been played.
There is no chance The Democrats will allow either of those scenarios to play out. It would destroy The Party and squander a golden opportunity to take control of both Congress and the Presidency.
The question then, is what is Hillary Clinton still doing in this race? Why is she desperately hanging on and frantically attempting to move the goal posts to any position which may help her? Why is she even going as far as to invoke the name and logic of the man known as Bush's Brain, Karl Rove? What is she up to?
The answer to all of these questions is a number; 2012.
While the Clinton's may be smart enough to understand that 2008 is out of reach they also happen to be stubborn enough to not give up on their ultimate goal of getting back into the White House.
A desire to achieve her loftiest goal is not a bad thing in itself, but the problem is that the Clinton's ambitions to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. place them in an awkward position within their own political party.
The fear of many Clinton supporters is that eight years from now, in 2016, Clinton will be too old to run for President. Not only would the then 69-year-old Clinton continue to face the challenges of being a female candidate for president, but she would also face the same age related criticism now being dished out to 72-year-old John McCain.
Many in the Clinton camp feel that the Senator's window of opportunity will not extend all the way into 2016. But they believe that window might be open in 2012 and that's what makes her ambitions awkward.
With Sen. Obama as the nominee of the Democratic Party in 2008, the only way Clinton can win the Presidency in 2012 is either to run against her own party's incumbent president or to root for McCain to win this year. Either way, she needs damage to be inflicted on the Democratic Party in order to achieve her ultimate goal.
While Clinton claims she wants to see a Democrat win the Presidency in November, regardless of who the nominee is, her actions do not match her words.
Sen. Clinton has adopted a scorched earth policy in this campaign which has shown little regard for the health or well-being of The Party or her opponent. That being said, she has toned down her anti-Obama rhetoric a notch or two, not because it is the right thing to do, but because her and her staff are intelligent enough to understand that running a tough campaign against Obama at this point puts her rapidly declining credibility at even greater risk.
This leaves Clinton in a tough spot. She wants Barack Obama to lose the General Election against McCain this year, but she doesn't want anyone to know that she wants that.
So instead of directly attacking Obama, she takes a more subtle approach to damaging Sen. Obama as he heads into the fall with the Democratic Nomination under his belt.
In the past day or two Clinton's surrogates have been clawing for any tiny piece of air time they can still get their hands on. They are using that time to make a desperate plea to the superdelegates to recognize Karl Rove's analysis of the situation that she is the stronger candidate to win in November than Barack Obama is.
The beauty of this is that it works on two levels for her. First, it plants those treasured seeds of doubt that any salesman trying to take a sale away from his opponent cherishes. Second, if all of Clinton's attacks do in fact end up doing considerable damage to the Obama campaign, Democrats will begin second guessing themselves. Many of them will start to think "Hmm...maybe we should have given Hillary a chance after all."
That thought is what gives Clinton a ticket to the 2012 nomination, or at least so she thinks.
Before she gets to 2012 however, there is still more fighting to be done here in 2008. Once again, Clinton can't be seen as the one perpetuating any anti-Obama sentiment, so the timing is perfect to send out the wacky Geraldine Ferraro to play the gender card against Obama.
Ferraro and the lunatic fringe of Team Clinton are claiming that Obama is sexist. But please, someone explain this to me. At what point in this campaign has Barack Obama acted in any manner that could be interpreted as sexist?
As Hillary Clinton knows all too well, the answer to this question is irrelevant. All that matters is that the current reality is manufactured in a way which benefits her. And right now that means a re-branding of Hillary Clinton as an underdog and a fighter.
She has taken many steps in this direction already and some have pointed to Clinton's ability to morph into whatever the politics of the moment want her to be and called it a strength. But really it is just one more indication that Clinton is stuck in the politics of yesterday.
All of these subtle attacks on Obama would not be as effectively pulled off if Sen. Clinton had to launch them from the sidelines. A continued campaign provides her with just enough of a veil to cover up her true intentions while at the same time giving her the reputation as being the little engine that could.
The problem is Hillary Clinton's window is not going to be open until 2012. In fact it has already closed and it is time for the Clintons to come to grips with the fact that as much as they wanted to move back into the White House it isn't going to happen.
The window was still open in early 2008, but the latch keeping it open had already been undone. The greatest mistake of Hillary Rodham Clinton's political career was not running in 2004. She would have had to break a campaign promise not to run in order to do so, but that's exactly what her husband did when he first ran in 1992.
In 2004 Hillary Clinton's window was wide open and for the past half decade I have wondered why she never jumped through it. She would have been a far better candidate than John Kerry and if she had run back then we probably wouldn't have even had a Democratic primary in 2004. Instead Clinton/Edwards would be gearing up to take on John McCain in a battle for their second term.
So even though we had to deal with the cloud of George W. Bush for four more years, the silver lining we got out of the deal, Barack Obama, almost makes up for it.
On that note, happy poll watching tonight. My prediction for Kentucky is that Clinton wins by 20% - 27%. Obama will win Oregon between 12% and 14%. Stay tuned. I'll be hanging out in the forums section again tonight, please feel free to drop by and say hello.
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