[Dialogue] Hate Springs Eternal

[dpelliott at aol.com]

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Op-Ed Columnist
Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War
by FRANK RICH

Published: February 10, 2008

WHAT if a presidential candidate held what she billed as “the largest, 
most interactive town hall in political history” on national 
television, and no one noticed?

The untold story in the run-up to Super Tuesday was Hillary Clinton’s 
elaborate live prime-time special the night before the vote. Presiding 
 from a studio in New York, the candidate took questions from audiences 
in 21 other cities. She had plugged the event four days earlier in the 
last gasp of her debate with Barack Obama and paid a small fortune for 
it: an hour of time on the Hallmark Channel plus satellite TV hookups 
for the assemblies of supporters stretching from coast to coast.

The same news media that constantly revisited the Oprah-Caroline-Maria 
rally in California ignored “Voices Across America: A National Town 
Hall.” The Clinton campaign would no doubt attribute this to press 
bias, but it scrupulously designed the event to avoid making news. Like 
the scripted “Ask President Bush” sessions during the 2004 campaign, 
this town hall seemed to unfold in Stepford. The anodyne questions 
(“What else would you do to help take care of our veterans?”) merely 
cued up laundry lists of talking points. Some in attendance appeared to 
trance out.

But I’m glad I watched every minute, right up until Mrs. Clinton was 
abruptly cut off in midsentence so Hallmark could resume its previously 
scheduled programming (a movie promising “A Season for Miracles,” aptly 
enough). However boring, this show was a dramatic encapsulation of how 
a once-invincible candidate ended up in a dead heat, crippled by 
poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product 
leeched of most human qualities. What’s more, it offered a naked 
preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral 
damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to come.

For a campaign that began with tightly monitored Web “chats” and then 
planted questions at its earlier town-hall meetings, a Bush-style 
pseudo-event like the Hallmark special is nothing new, of course. 
What’s remarkable is that instead of learning from these mistakes, Mrs. 
Clinton’s handlers keep doubling down.

Less than two weeks ago she was airlifted into her own, less effective 
version of “Mission Accomplished.” Instead of declaring faux victory in 
Iraq, she starred in a made-for-television rally declaring faux victory 
in a Florida primary that was held in defiance of party rules, involved 
no campaigning and awarded no delegates. As Andrea Mitchell of NBC News 
said, it was “the Potemkin village of victory celebrations.”

The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked 
like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally 
desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the 
effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, 
claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the 
event in addition to “who knows how many” Hallmark channel viewers. Who 
knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the “Yes We Can” Obama 
video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas 
had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the 
Obama campaign: zero.)

Two days after her town-hall extravaganza, Mrs. Clinton revealed the $5 
million loan she had made to her own campaign to survive a month in 
which the Obama operation had raised $32 million to her $13.5 million. 
That poignant confession led to a spike in contributions that Mr. Obama 
also topped. Though Tuesday was largely a draw in popular votes and 
delegates, every other indicator, from the candidates’ real and virtual 
crowds to hard cash, points to a steadily widening Obama-Clinton gap. 
The Clinton campaign might be an imploding Potemkin village itself were 
it not for the fungible profits from Bill Clinton’s murky 
post-presidency business deals. (The Clintons, unlike Mr. Obama, have 
not released their income-tax returns.)

The campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick 
deck of race cards. This was all too apparent in the Hallmark show. In 
its carefully calibrated cross section of geographically and 
demographically diverse cast members — young, old, one gay man, one 
vet, two union members — African-Americans were reduced to also-rans. 
One black woman, the former TV correspondent Carole Simpson, was given 
the servile role of the meeting’s nominal moderator, Ed McMahon to Mrs. 
Clinton’s top banana. Scattered black faces could be seen in the 
audience. But in the entire televised hour, there was not a single 
African-American questioner, whether to toss a softball or ask about 
the Clintons’ own recent misadventures in racial politics.

The Clinton camp does not leave such matters to chance. This decision 
was a cold, political cost-benefit calculus. In October, seven months 
after the two candidates’ dueling church perorations in Selma, USA 
Today found Hillary Clinton leading Mr. Obama among African-American 
Democrats by a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent. But once black 
voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton 
and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what 
African-Americans thought. In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. 
Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton 
strategist, Mark Penn, among others), “the black candidate” (as Clinton 
strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. 
Clinton himself).

The result? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her 
California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the 
black vote. The campaign saw this coming and so saw no percentage in 
bestowing precious minutes of prime-time television on African-American 
queries.

That time went instead to the Hispanic population that was still in 
play in Super Tuesday’s voting in the West. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa 
of Los Angeles had a cameo, and one of the satellite meetings was held 
in the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. There’s 
nothing wrong with that. It’s smart politics, especially since Mr. 
Obama has been behind the curve in wooing this constituency.

But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark 
show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic 
pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against 
each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not 
shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” 
Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a 
debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.”

It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, 
and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as 
heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist 
Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black 
members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black 
mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron 
Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the 
Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow 
misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to 
“undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build 
bridges and unite Americans of all types.”

If that was the intent, it didn’t work. Mrs. Clinton did pile up her 
expected large margin among Latino voters in California. But her tight 
grip on that electorate is loosening. Mr. Obama, who captured only 26 
percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada last month, did better than that 
in every state on Tuesday, reaching 41 percent in Arizona and 53 
percent in Connecticut. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign’s attempt to 
drive white voters away from Mr. Obama by playing the race card has 
backfired. His white vote tally rises every week. Though Mrs. Clinton 
won California by almost 10 percentage points, among whites she beat 
Mr. Obama by only 3 points.

The question now is how much more racial friction the Clinton campaign 
will gin up if its Hispanic support starts to erode in Texas, whose 
March 4 vote it sees as its latest firewall. Clearly it will stop at 
little. That’s why you now hear Clinton operatives talk ever more 
brazenly about trying to reverse party rulings so that they can hijack 
366 ghost delegates from Florida and the other rogue primary, Michigan, 
where Mr. Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. So much for Mrs. Clinton’s 
assurance on New Hampshire Public Radio last fall that it didn’t matter 
if she alone kept her name on the Michigan ballot because the vote “is 
not going to count for anything.”

Last month, two eminent African-American historians who have served in 
government, Mary Frances Berry (in the Carter and Clinton years) and 
Roger Wilkins (in the Johnson administration), wrote Howard Dean, the 
Democrats’ chairman, to warn him of the perils of that credentials 
fight. Last week, Mr. Dean became sufficiently alarmed to propose 
brokering an “arrangement” if a clear-cut victory by one candidate 
hasn’t rendered the issue moot by the spring. But does anyone seriously 
believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that 
it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black 
America to win a primary?

A race-tinged brawl at the convention, some nine weeks before Election 
Day, will not be a Hallmark moment. As Mr. Wilkins reiterated to me 
last week, it will be a flashback to the Democratic civil war of 1968, 
a suicide for the party no matter which victor ends up holding the 
rancid spoils.

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