(This is a guest post from Mark Phillips, a Bay Area professor of secondary education and frequent guest columnist on educational issues for the Marin Independent-Journal newspaper.)
Hillary, Quixote, and Machiavelli: Beyond Pennsylvania
By Mark Phillips
The only basis for deciding the Democratic party nominee is the delegate count. Those are the rules. It is impossible for Hillary Clinton to legitimately win the elected delegate race. Place the emphasis on “legitimately.” So where does that leave us?
After all the hoopla surrounding her victory in Pennsylvania, she has only closed the delegate gap by 10 delegates. (and by the way, she won by 9.2%, not 10%!) Obama is likely to cancel that out with his certain victory in North Carolina. The remaining primaries are expected to end up splitting the delegates almost evenly.
Her campaign has been an exercise in Machiavellian amoral politics and a Don Quixote like attack on the Obama windmill.
From the Machiavelli playbook comes foremost the lie about her experience in Bosnia. She later described it as a mistake and said that she “misspoke.” She signed an agreement, as did other candidates, to not compete in Michigan after the state violated Democratic party rules. She not only broke the agreement, she has worked to have the votes count despite the fact that no other candidate competed. Given an opportunity to acknowledge the absurdity of the story of Obama being Muslim, she chose to respond “I’ll take his word for it.” Please note that these were all conscious choices.
I could go on, but is more proof really needed that in this campaign she has been integrity-deficient?
And in the supporting cast, the performances of George Stephanopoulos on the ABC debate and James Carville, every time he’s interviewed and continually behind the scenes, should remind us that the only thing that really distinguishes them from Carl Rove is that they were for our guy in the 90’s.
This is a political operation that right now is ethically bankrupt.
Her entry in the Quixote award competition is also exemplary.
She cannot win legitimately. Obama’s campaign and his lead are like the windmill in Don Quixote. But, like Quixote, she apparently can’t see this. She is compelled to continuing attacking however impossible the victory,
The difference though is that Quixote was a comic character; Clinton is not. Her complicity in the continued use of the Reverend Wright tape has been destructive not just to Obama but to the Democrats in the Fall. It should be noted that this is despite the fact that she and Bill had Wright in to the White House for counsel when they went through their own travails years ago. Every time she lends credence to personal attacks on Obama she damages the party. The problem is that the windmill contains the Democratic party’s hopes for the Fall.
This has become so pronounced that some political analysts wonder if she is just setting herself up to be the nominee in 2012 by destroying his chances. I doubt this. I think she is under the delusion that she can still win and that her drive to win has blinded her both ethically and analytically. But the fact that credible political experts even consider that a possibility is indication enough of how much damage her campaign is wreaking despite the fact that she really has no legitimate chance.
As to legitimacy, she can only win if a large proportion of the undecided super-delegates vote for her AND if the rules committee decides to count the Florida and Michigan votes. Both are extremely unlikely and both would spell disaster for the Democrats in the Fall, with millions of young voters and African American voters either not voting or supporting a third party candidate.
Should she pull out now? No. But if the remaining primaries go as expected, with little change in the proportion of delegates, she should do so in June. This assumes some reawakening of a sense of ethics, a true commitment to party more than self, and a recognition that continued personal attacking of the likely nominee will be something that she herself will eventually regret.
She should do everything she can to take a high road, focusing solely on the issues, not deriding Obama’s capabilities in any way that will weaken his chances in the Fall, and acting as a true stateswoman. If she can do that she will restore the faith in her integrity that many of us once had but have lost.
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