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April 22, 2008

Pennsylvania's Vote Today Will Speak Volumes

I was quite interested yesterday to read the ever-fascinating Andrew Sullivan’s latest editorial, “Judgment Day looms for Hillary Clinton the wrecker.” As always, his perspective and choice of words are engaging and insightful.

Even after all the hype, this Tuesday’s vote in Pennsylvania will be a watershed primary election. This isn’t because it could determine whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues on its brutal, nihilistic path towards the destruction of the most promising figure in the Democratic party since Kennedy.

… [T]he Clintons have turned Pennsylvania into a microcosm of what they think the general election will be in November. And the Clintons are running as the Rove Republicans. If they fail to destroy Barack Obama as effectively as Karl Rove – Bush’s master of the dark arts – destroyed Al Gore and John Kerry in 2000 and 2004, with tactics just as brutal but even more personal, then they will have driven American politics to a critical point. They will have shown that the paradigm that has reigned in US politics for at least two decades has been shattered.

That’s what is being tested this coming week. It may be the most important vote in America until the final one in November.

Sullivan looks at how Clinton has essentially argued for months now that Obama is a secret Muslim, that he wants Americans not to have health insurance, that he was once a drug dealer, that he is a radical, that he is elitist, that he is un-American, and that he associates with terrorists and anti-Semites, taking “the campaign warfare to a whole new level of earth-scorching.”

And what is remarkable about all this is that most of it was not done by surrogates, but by a former president of the United States against a senator in his own party, and directly by Clinton herself. Every time you think: “Nah, they won’t go there, will they?” – they do.

Sullivan feels Obama has wilted under the pressure. Perhaps so, and it would be entirely understandable, particularly seeing as how he is a real human being and not a movie actor, a la Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis, playing a heroic role and resting in comfort between scenes. But based on what I’ve heard from him the more likely explanation is that on top of being exhausted from his schedule and the constant, gleeful attacks by the Clinton machine, he is becoming as depressed and nearly hopeless about the state of American politics and the future of this country as I am.

I love Sullivan’s description of the Clinton approach:

In one debate, all the tactics deployed by Republicans since Lee Atwater ran George Bush Sr’s guns-and-flags-and-taxes campaign in 1988 were unloaded on the rookie. Clinton grinned. The next day, her husband said she “did great”. There was almost a liberated sense in the Clinton camp that, finally, they had been able to do to a Democrat what Republicans had done to them for the past two decades: insinuate treason, lack of patriotism, elitist snobbery, countercultural deviance, and every other red-blue hot-button meme that could stroke some electoral erogenous zone somewhere.

I believe Sullivan is absolutely right when he concludes that today’s election in Pennsylvania will register the level to which Americans are ready to “debate something more than lapel pins” and enter “a new era.” And so that is why I will be quite interested to see the results tonight.

It will be easier to understand if you read an editorial that Sullivan wrote back in December, “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters.” The introduction is below, but please go read the entire article. It is excellent and poignant, particularly as we see the war within America sink to new lows almost daily.

The logic behind the candidacy of Barack Obama is not, in the end, about Barack Obama. It has little to do with his policy proposals, which are very close to his Democratic rivals’ and which, with a few exceptions, exist firmly within the conventions of our politics. It has little to do with Obama’s considerable skills as a conciliator, legislator, or even thinker. It has even less to do with his ideological pedigree or legal background or rhetorical skills. Yes, as the many profiles prove, he has considerable intelligence and not a little guile. But so do others, not least his formidably polished and practiced opponent Senator Hillary Clinton.

Obama, moreover, is no saint. He has flaws and tics: Often tired, sometimes crabby, intermittently solipsistic, he’s a surprisingly uneven campaigner.

A soaring rhetorical flourish one day is undercut by a lackluster debate performance the next. He is certainly not without self-regard. He has more experience in public life than his opponents want to acknowledge, but he has not spent much time in Washington and has never run a business. His lean physique, close-cropped hair, and stick-out ears can give the impression of a slightly pushy undergraduate. You can see why many of his friends and admirers have urged him to wait his turn. He could be president in five or nine years’ time—why the rush?

But he knows, and privately acknowledges, that the fundamental point of his candidacy is that it is happening now. In politics, timing matters. And the most persuasive case for Obama has less to do with him than with the moment he is meeting. The moment has been a long time coming, and it is the result of a confluence of events, from one traumatizing war in Southeast Asia to another in the most fractious country in the Middle East. The legacy is a cultural climate that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse.

Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo¬mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

I know many people wonder why I have become so enthusiastic about Barack Obama’s candidacy, considering I am conservative and oppose several of his key platforms. This article explains what I have come to believe very deeply, and why I believe at this time we must address the thing that only Obama can address, or our entire future as a nation is in peril.

So if I could say one thing to Barack Obama, it would be this: Don't wilt. You are not standing alone. Millions of Americans are standing with you and willing you forward. Please do not let this destructiveness take you down, because we need you to help us end this war. In essence, Senator Obama, you are us.

Posted by Becky at April 22, 2008 12:51 PM