Obama: It's Hillary's to Lose, Not Yours to Win

Posted September 29, 2007

What an amazing week in the Presidential primaries — probably a turning point. Hillary Clinton continues to evidence a mastery of the sport that eludes Barack Obama. It pains me to say it, but the nomination and the Presidency are now hers to lose.

It is no secret that I am not a huge fan of Hillary Clinton. To start with, if she is elected and serves 8 years, the United States will have been run by two mediocre families for 28 years. As AP noted yesterday

"Already, for 116 million Americans, there has never been a time when
there wasn’t a Bush or Clinton in the White House, either as president
or vice president."

As a Clinton Labor undersecretary, I had a front row seat for HillaryCare and often compare the experience to a slow-motion

train wreck. Hillary was arrogant in the extreme (leading physicians and health care professionals had little voice), technocratic (nobody, least of all her husband, understood her 1200 page plan), a terrible legislative tactician (Bob Dole had offered a compromise health care plan that many of us would kill to have in place today), and badly over-reaching
(attempting to completely restructure with a single bill what was then
a $1 trillion industry representing a seventh of the economy). Plus,
she she has Al Gore’s tendency to go from being warm and smart in
person to being a robot on TV. Even though sexist conservatives taunt
it, her warm laugh really does start to cackle.

The HillaryCare debacle reflected more than inexperience — it reflected fundamental character traits, like the ones that led her husband to become well-known for stained
dresses, stolen furniture, and pardoned fugitive donors. These traits
were later on display during the White House
travel office scandal, the Wendell Hubbard / Rose Law firm fiasco, and
her largely forgotten futures trading scandal.

So what is there, exactly, to like? Quite a bit, surprisingly.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed that "there are no second acts in American lives" but in politics at the moment there are nothing but second acts. We
have witnessed Al Gore 2.0 — the man who for better and often worse
owns the global warming franchise. Bill Clinton 2.0 is redefining
charitable giving as profoundly as Bill Gates 2.0 has. Newt Gingrich
2.0 is a provocative social and political commentator who has made
common cause more than once with Hillary Clinton and sings her praises
at every turn.

Hillary Clinton not only announced a new and much improved
HillaryCare 2.0 this week, but the political leader announcing is
unrecognizable from the walking West Wing disaster of 1993. This is Hillary 2.0.

She has clearly grown as a political leader.
Hillary has been a far better Senator than I would have predicted
(truth is, Bill has the finger-in-the-air personality of a Senator. She
is by disposition made for the executive branch, which is why I did not
foresee great things for her as a legislator). She is highly respected
by her adversaries and ideological opponents — which does not happen a
lot in Washington. Like her husband, she devours her briefing books and
does her political homework.

In refusing to apologize for her vote to go to war in Iraq, she has
been less craven then most — although I would have preferred

"my plan for Iraq is to win and come home.
By win, I mean destroy Al Qaeda in Iraq, leave in place a functioning
national army and three semi-autonomous federated states: Kurdish,
Sunni, and Shia with a shared Baghdad". (Not a perfect plan. Not a
perfect world. Sue me.)

Her primary campaign has been a masterpiece that will be studied for years. MicroTrends
Meister Mark Penn and Hillary get a lot of credit and Bill is sticking
to his lines and not upstaging his wife. These folks play hardball when
needed (as this report makes clear).

Obama by contrast is raw undeveloped talent. He
is a far more interesting candidate — but a far less seasoned one.
This is not the usual tripe about not being experienced enough — he is
the same age, intellect, and experience as Bill Clinton was at this
stage.

But Hillary is running circles around him – even if I wish she weren’t. The latest: she votes Presidential on a key foreign policy vote and
leaves Obama looking like a wannabe with NetRoots all over his face.
Hillary is making him pay a huge price for his failure to take this advice and she is doing it effortlessly. Obama cannot even find all of the knives she has in him. She, on the other hand, is being called Teflon
by the press — (the highest praise a politician can receive from the
media, since it what the press call you when they admit defeat).

Even the Wall Street Journal is treating her as Presidential, noting

Kudos
to Hillary.. for her Senate vote this week urging the U.S. to designate
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist
organization. That’s more than can be said for her primary competition
of Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson and John Edwards, who
assailed her on this score at Wednesday’s Democratic Presidential
candidates debate at Dartmouth. These are men who seem to fear the
Netroots more than the mullahs.

Hillary is 2-3 weeks away from turning the race into a coronation and making Iowa as irrelevant to Democrats as it will be to Republicans. Obama can no longer stop her – only she can do that. And no, Obama will not be her running mate (Senator Ev
Bayh of Indiana endorsed Hillary this week. Smart boy. Bayh is a former
governor and son of former Indiana Senator Birch Bayh. Bayh is a proven vote
getter in the part of the country that swings Presidential elections. He just
joined Bill Richardson on the VP list. Obama won’t even get a phone call — his supporters
have nowhere else to go and Hillary knows it).

Al Gore won’t run because he hasn’t got the stones for it. These days, he can’t even face his critics
– many of whom are a lot more credible on global warming than he is.
Hillary would have his lunch in an afternoon — and both of them know
it.

There may be second acts
in American politics, but there is no second place.