Voice of Reason from Ohio: Hillary Should Embrace the Will of Millions of Democratic Voters...

This is a very good 'call to reason' that may be flawed in its assumption that Hillary WANTS the democrats to win this fall. Hillary knows she has lost the nomination to Obama, leaving her with one singular and maniacal goal: "Deliver the 08 election to McCain so I can run against him in 2012." zjm

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Hillary's Choice

MESSY. That's one way of describing the unending presidential primary battle between Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But the current standoff also accurately reflects the state of mind of Democratic voters, who are divided but not yet fractured, and any solution to the current impasse must reflect the will of those voters.

Mrs. Clinton's victory in Pennsylvania - solid but not overwhelming - left her standing to fight another day. To use a baseball analogy, her team is down three games to none in the best of seven Championship Series. The prospects are bleak, almost insurmountable. But then, we are reminded that in 2004 the Boston Red Sox were in that exact position and went on to win eight straight games and capture their first World Series in 86 years.
Mrs. Clinton cannot overtake Mr. Obama in pledged delegates, and it will be virtually impossible for her to eat significantly into his lead of more than 500,000 in the cumulative popular vote. What she needs to win outright would be a stunning collapse by Mr. Obama, some gaffe or revelation so damaging he could not defeat presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in the fall.
As the 2004 World Series made clear, anything is possible. But the question is not whether Mrs. Clinton can close the gap in the remaining primaries but whether she should.
Our feeling is that she should not.

Barring an unlikely en masse declaration by the approximately 250 so-far-uncommmitted super delegates, the nominee will not be known until the Democratic National Convention meets in Denver in August. Mrs. Clinton's only real hope is to convince the party leaders who make up the bulk of super delegates that because she won the big states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, California, and the like), she's a better choice to go head-to-head with Mr. McCain.
If she were successful, the party leaders and insiders who make up the super delegates would effectively be rejecting the will of millions of Democratic voters and relying, instead, on their individual judgment of what is best for the party.
That would make Mrs. Clinton and party elders little better than the Republicans, who used the courts to set aside the will of the electorate in 2000 to make George W. Bush president. We all know how that worked out.
Additionally, the longer Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama battle, the more damage they will inflict on each other and the more likely they are - through fatigue or overreaching - to damage themselves. We've seen the beginning of this process in recent weeks with Mrs. Clinton's fabrication of a harrowing tale of coming under sniper fire in Bosnia, as well as the revelations about Mr. Obama's pastor and the Illinois senator's connections to Weather Underground founding member William Ayres and Tony Rezko, a politically connected developer on trial on corruption charges.
If the primary battle continues in ugly style, the only winners will be those masters of the "politics of personal destruction," Republican strategists.
If Mrs. Clinton really wants to see a Democrat in the White House in 2009, it's time for her to reject both the political maneuvering of smoke-filled backrooms and the temptation to wage such a bitter battle that no matter which candidate emerges, he or she will be bloodied beyond hope of recovery.
Instead, she should embrace the will of millions of Democratic voters before she hands victory to Senator McCain, dooming the United States to four more years of failed Bush policies on Iraq, the economy, and a host of other critical issues.