"Only unremitting ambition and an overwhelming desire for power could now be driving Mrs Clinton."

Very good analysis that is, most often, missing from the American media
- zjm



Commentary: Desperate Hillary shows her true colours

Published on Saturday, May 10, 2008 | Caribbean Net News | By Sir Ronald Sanders

It is unlikely that by the time this commentary is read Hillary Clinton would have conceded victory to Barack Obama in the race for the US Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, even though she should.

Mrs Clinton is no longer a credible candidate. The figures speak for themselves: Obama far outstrips her in the popular vote. He now leads her by an insurmountable 715,000. Obama has 1,840 delegates, Clinton has 1,688. The winner needs 2,025 and there is no way that Mrs Clinton could overhaul Obama in the remaining six contests (five states and Puerto Rico) which together will yield only 217 delegates, and from support by the super delegates, only 269 of whom are uncommitted.

Sir Ronald Sanders is a business executive and former Caribbean diplomat who publishes widely on small states in the global community.

Obama needs only 30% of those votes to make him the winner; Clinton requires 70%. And, As the Los Angeles Times editorialised: “Even if Clinton were to win every remaining state by a comfortable margin, she could not amass enough delegates before the convention to pass Obama”.

But, yet, she is remaining in the race and, in the process, creating fissures in the Democratic Party and giving ammunition to the Republican candidate, John McCain, to use against Obama.

Only unremitting ambition and an overwhelming desire for power could now be driving Mrs Clinton.

No greater testimony to this unrelenting resolve could be needed than the fact that while donors have now abandoned the financing of her campaign she has personally loaned it $6.4 million, added to an earlier sum of $5 million that she and her husband, former US President Bill Clinton, made to it.

Whatever her motivation now is, she is demonstrating an almost vicious determination to stay in the campaign to the end, even though it will surely damage the Democratic Party’s struggle against a settled Republican Party candidate.

In recent television interviews she has appeared calculating, even scheming.

When Obama’s views or statements are put to her for reaction, she seems intolerant, bordering on irritated. She seems to draw on great reserves of forbearance just to be civil when Obama’s name is mentioned.

Yet, except in the minds of the most die-hard supporters of Mrs Clinton, there can be no doubt that Obama has beaten her solidly. She can now count only on the backing of less affluent and less educated white voters.

After her very poor showing in North Carolina where Obama won 56% of the vote to her 42%, and her even worse showing in Indiana where she won by only 2% although she was expected to trounce him decisively, the right thing for Mrs Clinton to have done was to concede graciously.

She didn’t. Instead two days later, she played the race card.

Not enough was attention was paid by the main stream media in the US of the spin she put on an Associated Press (AP) exit poll of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. According to the AP poll, Clinton won about 60 per cent of the white vote in both states. Mrs Clinton interpreted that to mean that “white Americans” are turning away from Obama.

She is reported to have told a reporter for the magazine, USA Today, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on”.

What she ignored was the fact that since March 4th in Ohio where she won 65 per cent of the white vote, her support among whites has been declining. In Pennsylvania on April 22nd, she won 63 per cent of the white vote, down to 60% in both North Carolina and Indiana on May 6th.

She was bold, if economical with the truth, by saying that the AP poll “found how Senator Obama’s support among hard working Americans – white Americans – is weakening again and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me”.

But, it was her last assertion about the poll that showed Mrs Clinton’s readiness to use race to frighten Democrats into handing her the Presidential nomination. She said: “These (the whites who had not completed college) are the people you have to win - if you’re a Democrat – in sufficient numbers to actually win the (Presidential) election”.

When, in the past, Mrs Clinton said that Obama was “unelectable”, commentators suggested that she meant he was inexperienced. In the context of the white voters she claims to represent, it looks as if she now means he is also not white.

From the very beginning of this campaign, when I wrote two commentaries entitled, No Black in The White House, my belief had been that race would be used against Obama being elected President of the United States.

But, I have to admit that while I fully expected the Republican campaign to whip it up unmercifully if Obama emerged as the Democratic nominee, I did not expect it to come from Hillary Clinton. Certainly not after the almost blind support that the black American community gave to both she and her husband, not only in his election as US President but also in the travails that followed especially over the Monica Lewinski affair.

What has also been amazing about the Clinton campaign is that it has characterised Obama as having “elitist sensibilities”. This was a turn up for the books –, an African American being elitist while the white American candidate is not. My, how times have changed.

Given all this, it looks as if Hillary Clinton will prolong the campaign for the Democratic nomination to the bitter end.

That end will be one of two: either when Obama gets to the magic figure of 2,025 delegates, or when the leadership of the Democratic Party has enough gumption to tell Mrs Clinton that she has caused the candidacy of the Democrats enough harm, and she should withdraw so that the Party could focus on John McCain.