Shedding Tears for Hillary

Memo to disaffected Clinton Democrats arriving in Denver: Forty years ago at the convention in Chicago, as a delegate supporting anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy, I was tear-gassed by the police of Mayor Richard Daley, a supporter of Hubert Humphrey. The Democrats lost that election and Richard Nixon moved into the White House.

The internal strife will be less riotous this week, but the danger of self-inflicted damage is just as great. The passions in 1968 were political, about ending a war, but the powerful feelings of 2008 are personal, about perceived sexism and disrespect for the first woman within reach of a presidential nomination.

From the sidelines, hopeful Republicans are shedding crocodile tears for Hillary Clinton with TV commercials about being "passed over," and ardent feminists like William Kristol are bemoaning "The Democrats' Glass Ceiling."

Such sympathy is touching, coming from those whose political sensitivities have brought on a devastating war and economic chaos, but Democrats of all persuasions are faced with the challenge of not letting their own passion for fairness and justice lead to another victory for politicians whose priorities are power and privilege.

That would be cause for sadness beyond tears.

Obama's Changing Message of Change

Today the New York Times editorializes about the "New and Not Improved" Barack Obama.

It's disheartening to see "The Audacity of Hope" beginning to morph into "The Mendacity of Change" and disappointing that Obama may be taking for granted those whose hopes he stirred and reaching out too far and too fast to those who will only see his efforts to build consensus as duplicity and weakness.

A month ago, it would have been unthinkable to write that sentence, but since wrapping up the nomination, the apostle of the New Politics has been looking like a Mr. Hyde of the old on almost an issue a day--public campaign financing, telecom immunity in the FISA bill, gun control, the death penalty for crimes not involving murder and the separation of church and state.

"We are not shocked," the Times says, "when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games."

Political purity is not the issue in all this. Many Obama admirers value, among other qualities, his open-mindedness and his not-Bush aversion to dogmaticism. But these recent rapid shifts of substance and tone raise suspicions of calculation and opportunism--of a too-clever-by-half attempt to retool his image for demographic purposes.

If so, he and his campaign advisers risk losing much of what got him to where he is now--an authenticity that this year's voters desperately want.

The campaign may want to stop worrying so much about converting Independents and liberal Republicans and concentrate on winning over and solidify his support among those Democrats who backed Hillary Clinton. They are a more natural constituency for him, if he can win and keep their trust.

In a dialogue with dissenting voters on his web site about his FISA position, Obama made a point worth keeping in mind for the long run:

"I learned long ago, when working as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago, that when citizens join their voices together, they can hold their leaders accountable. I’m not exempt from that. I’m certainly not perfect, and expect to be held accountable too."

Clinton's Clincher for Obama

As they begin their unity tour this week, Hillary Clinton has a powerful argument to win over diehard supporters who resist backing Barack Obama because he kept her from becoming the first woman in the Oval Office.

If John McCain is elected, they can kiss goodbye to Roe v Wade, which has been teetering in the Supreme Court balance since Bush started naming Justices and would surely be overturned in another Republican Administration.

As late as last year, McCain told Tim Russert on Meet the Press: "I have stated time after time after time that Roe v Wade was a bad decision...To me, it's an issue of human rights and human dignity."

So much for pro-choice and the illusions of Independents and disaffected Democrats that, on the overriding issue of women's rights, McCain is not Bush Redux.

Obama ran into flak at the Black Caucus last week for saying, "If women take a moment to realize that on every issue important to women, John McCain is not in their corner, that would help them get over it."

Hillary Clinton can help everyone involved "get over it" by reminding ardent supporters, both men and women, of what could be at stake if they fail to do so.

Speaking About Sexism

Gloria Steinem thinks Barack Obama should make the same kind of speech about gender that he did about race and, according to the New York Times, he is considering it.

Not a great idea. That speech was prompted by the Jeremiah Wright uproar and would otherwise not have been made. To suggest that Obama should be as embarrassed about defeating Hillary Clinton as he was by his former pastor's rhetoric is a faulty equivalence.

He was forced to distance himself from Wright because of their past association, but there is a kind of "When did you stop beating your wife?" logic in asking Obama to prove he is not sexist when no fair-minded observer has accused him of such speech or behavior during the long primary contest with Clinton.

Obama can best make peace with Clinton supporters who feel cheated by appealing to them as citizens and Democrats rather than scorned women. Just as he does not "owe" them the choice of Hillary as a running mate, neither does he owe them an apology for being African-American and male.

Anything else would be the worst kind of condescension and sexism.

Hell's Grannies for Hillary

The war for the Democratic nomination replayed a scene out of Monty Python yesterday with women of a certain age venting their rage at the decision to allocate delegates in a way that leaves Hillary Clinton short of the votes she needs.

“Mrs. Clinton has instructed me to reserve her rights to take this to the credentials committee,” Harold Ickes threatened, and his words drew cheers from Clinton supporters yelling “Denver! Denver! Denver!” to urge fighting on to the convention in late August.

AP reports, "Proponents of full seating continuously interrupted the committee members as they explained their support of the compromise, then supporters of the deal shouted back.

"'Shut up!' one woman shouted at another.

"You shut up!' the second woman shouted back."

With all that's at stake this year, the last thing Democrats need is a rerun of the Hell's Grannies skit to counter the Republicans' Upperclass Twit of the Year. Can't they just settle on John McCain as the Dead Parrot?

Obama-McCain Numbers Game

Reading tea leaves from the new November polls is as hard as it was a year ago to see what was really going behind the numbers that showed Hillary Clinton running away with the Democratic nomination.

Now, despite post-Bush Republican disarray, the new Pew poll shows "a tightening general election matchup between Obama and McCain" under a headline that says, "McCain's Negatives Mostly Political, Obama's More Personal."

It's tempting to decode that as racism, but the reasons are surely more complicated.

For a start, there is the question of familiarity. Like Clinton, McCain has been in national politics much longer than Obama with a reputation for being strong-minded and independent, an edge that may account for some of his support as it did in the case of the former First Lady last year among voters who don't follow politics closely.

Moreover, the Clinton campaign's attacks on Obama are still fresh, as reflected in figures that show only 46 percent of her supporters saying the party will unite behind him in November.

Over the next five months, Democrats will be faced with healing those wounds and winning over Obama doubters who find his promise of change threatening rather than hopeful.

The candidate himself will have to do the heavy lifting to persuade the 82 percent of voters unhappy with the way things are going that he is a better answer to their disaffection than a Republican, no matter how personable, who will continue Bush's policies on the economy and the war in Iraq.

Obama's choice of a running mate will weigh heavily in that equation. After that, he surely will have to go to Iraq and show himself as a potential commander-in-chief who can connect with the troops while winning the respect of their senior officers, even as he proposes to change the policies that have mired them there.

The election is his to lose, no matter what the tea leaves say now.