The Clinton civil war
by kos
Mon Mar 17, 2008 at 10:25:22 AM PDT
Al Giordano, on the laughable Clinton-supporters "strike" of this blog:
There was always something incongruous about the self-proclaimed “Hillary Bloggers” trying to use Daily Kos for their purposes. DKos has been defined as a meeting ground not for every Democrat, but for the kind that wants to change the party to be more grassroots oriented, adhere to a 50-state strategy, stop the war in Iraq, and blunt the influence of lobbyists, PACs and the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). That’s the glue that has always held the DKos community together and made it so large and strong.
Given that candidate Clinton is a member of the DLC, voted to authorize the war, accepts federal lobbyist and PAC money, clearly thinks that a lot (if not most) states “don’t matter,” and epitomizes a 1990s style top-down form of doing politics, it’s no surprise that for all of 2007 Clinton never exceeded 11 percent support in the monthly Daily Kos users straw poll.
I would add one more item to the list above -- this site has also been hostile to the corrosive consultant class that gave us our timid and weak party until Howard Dean shook it up in 2004.
Now I'm willing to stipulate that on the consultant front, there's likely not much difference between the Obama and Clinton campaigns (I don't know if it's true, but I assume it is). But on everything else, Clinton fails the test of the guiding principles of this site, and of my first book,
Crashing the Gate.
Clinton isn't just a
member of the DLC, she's in their
leadership. Obama, by the way, repudiated the organization three times (it's a great story, which I tell in my forthcoming book).
Clinton hasn't just rejected a 50-state strategy, she has openly attacked it. CTG has a great quote from former Virginia Governor and future senator Mark Warner on this very topic:
The Democratic Party is in the upswing in the Mountain West and the South, in places like Montana and Virginia, because Democrats there have made a serious effort to compete for votes everywhere, rather than make a nominal effort to be an "also-ran" outside the Democratic-density areas. As [former Virginia Gov. Mark] Warner asks, how many more times will the Democrats run presidential campaigns where they abandon thirty-three southern and western states and "launch a national campaign that goes after sixteen states and then hope that we can hit a triple bank shot to get to that seventeenth state?"
Well, given Obama's map-changing 50-state mindset, it's clear that the answer to Warner's question is "one more time" if Clinton is the nominee, and "never again" if Obama is the nominee.
Clinton didn't just vote for the Iraq war and refuse to apologize for it, she voted to give Bush the same authority on
Iran.
And if we want to talk about which party is the most grassroots-oriented, it's no contest. We've seen it in the caucuses, we've seen it in the netroots, and we saw it in the Iowa county convention this Saturday. The party's activists are busting their butts for Obama, while Clinton's campaign is counting on low-information Democratic voters selecting Clinton based on little more than name ID.
But I could deal with all of that, really, if Clinton was headed toward victory. I see this as a long-term movement, and I've always expected setbacks along the way. Clinton isn't the most horrible person in the world. She's actually quite nice, despite all her flaws, and would make a fine enough president.
If she was winning.
But
she's not, and that's the rub.
First of all,
the only path to victory for Clinton is via coup by super delegate.
She knows this. That's why there's all the talk about poaching pledged delegates and
spinning uncertainty around Michigan and Florida, and laying the case for super delegates to discard the popular will and stage a coup.
Yet a coup by super delegate would
sunder the party in civil war.
Clinton knows this, it's her only path to victory,
and she doesn't care. She is willing -- nay,
eager to split the party apart in her mad pursuit of power.
If the situations were reversed, and Obama was lagging in the delegates, popular vote, states won, money raised, and every other reasonable measure, then I'd feel the same way about Obama. (I pulled the plug early on Dean in 2004.) But that's not the case.
It is Clinton, with no reasonable chance of victory, who is fomenting civil war in order to overturn the will of the Democratic electorate. As such, as far as I'm concerned, she doesn't deserve "fairness" on this site. All sexist attacks will be dealt with -- those will
never be acceptable. But otherwise, Clinton has set an inevitably divisive course and must be dealt with appropriately.
Daily Kos: State of the Nation
Hillary Clinton's Civil War pt.2
Linear Mode
