Check or Checkmate? Will Old or New Hillary Prevail?
As they headed to the final week, longtime election observers speculated what Obama and Clinton might do in what could prove to be a climax - if Obama prevails - or a turning point in the gruelling primary campaign they’ve run, which could keep it alive till June. Would either gain a key endorsement, announce a visionary plan, dig deep for some dirt to throw? Could Obama deliver some sort of knockout blow?
Would there be a ‘March Surprise’?
The hour’s likely too late now for any further surprises, but even the conventional wisdom about timing could be changed if more is planned today or early Monday.
With her appearance on Saturday Night Live last night, it’s uncertain how the judges in Ohio and Texas will rule. The judges in Vermont and Rhode Island may well cancel each other out in any impact in the delegate count. So the standard that was set by Team Clinton - that she’s gotta win both - remains the bar for her to hurdle. But there remains some fuzziness even in that.
Should she win by a narrow margin but tie or lose ground in the delegate count, the task ahead grows steeper still, requiring winning margins beyond any she’s done outside of the uncontested states of Florida and Michigan. But those wins could keep the fundraising spigots open. Without two wins, the flow likely will grow too dry to continue.
As it turned out, Obama went the path of a confident frontrunner. The impressive endorsement of a major Civil Rights champion - John Lewis - was not a huge surprise, as he’d signalled he might do so well in advance. Endorsements from Bill Richardson or John Edwards or Zonkar, Lord Goobajoo of the Universe arrived for neither, so Obama campaigned hard and outspent Clinton in TV ads.
As for Clinton, there were no real low blows thrown, as going too negative has proven to be a liability in a year with new precedents being established throughout. Instead, Team Clinton emptied out its bag of tricks, many of them old, and some - like her SNL appearance - seemingly new. I’ve dubbed it her Sun-Tzu Strategy.
Prior to what might be finals week, she’d switched campaign managers, returned Ickes to the fold to glean what he had, and pulled out the stops in pursuit of campaign dollars. And as the week has shown, she remained consistent with the theme that her experience and mettle were long-tested and necessary, while Obama was a gamble that we could ill-afford.
In the last week, however, while old strategies from long campaign experience were played, another subtle change was also taking place. While the old tactics kept Obama attentive to parry each, a far, far older tactic was unfolding.
Though the enemy is many, he can be prevented from doing battle.
Therefore, know the enemy’s plans and calculate their strengths and weaknesses.
Provoke him, to know his patterns of movement.
Determine his position, to know the ground of death and of life.
Probe him, to know where he is strong and where he is weak.
The ultimate skill is to take up a position where you are formless.
If you are formless, the most penetrating spies will not be able to discern you, or the wisest counsels will not be able to do calculations against you.
With formation, the army achieves victories yet they do not understand how.
Everyone knows the formation by which you achieved victory, yet no one knows the formations by which you were able to create victory.
Therefore, your strategy for victories in battle is not repetitious, and your formations in response to the enemy are endless.
Sun-Tzu: The Art of War
It could be the combined effort of Mark, Harold, Maggie, Chelsea, Bill and Hillary, but the question remains whether it was enough. Instead of maintaining a solid message front and just defending her core supporters, she also made a considerable thrust at his. Look at what played out:
Old tactics from long experience: Emphasize experience. Run ads with overtones stretching back 24 and 44 years. (Easy to make fun of, but the uncertainty and fear card does have some impact). Call in the old posse where it might help. And attack the press constantly to keep them on the defensive, so they will be less prone to go too negative on you.
The Sun-Tzu tactics: Camouflage: if they look for anger, wear cheer (SNL the best example). Formlessness: while they watch the old posse at work running the ground game in Texas (and Gephardt in Ohio, and Harold Ickes), round up another for the thrust… in this case, a major force in Bill’s victories, Hollywood.
And then attack the enemy’s strength: young voters.
That’s why Chelsea’s been coming more to the forefront and also calling college contacts to assist. That’s what the SNL appearance did. That’s what buying last-minute ads across the progressive blogosphere did, even at moderate-traffic sites like ours. And The Daily Show this Monday night!
Need more proof? Look at the ad in the right sidebar. How youthful and attractive Hillary is. It looks so 1992. Then click through to the videos and watch for 3 or 4 minutes. I saw young people everywhere, talking points abound. A young guy mimicking Obama. And Jack Nicholson. A place where others can upload their videos, too to chime in. And the cleverest part was, I probably didn’t stay long enough to see the amateur stuff at all. I likely saw the staged young, and the Hollywood, with the messages they want to drive home to the younger voters who enter.
Credit goes to Hillary for utilizing the internet in a way that might have some impact. In a close race, every tool and ally available is wisely employed.
In Saturday’s polling, I saw her lead slip more in Ohio (Zogby had it a perfect tie), but Obama’s small lead in Texas slipped, too. Subtle shifts in the final 3 days often are the undecideds coming in, so Monday and early Tuesday the polls likely will indicate whether the Sun-Tzu Strategy makeover worked. I’ll also be watching TV to see if Hillary’s speech snippets will also show her speaking before crowds of younger voters. If more of Hollywood is featured.
Do you think it’s enough? Did she go after a key Obama demographic too late? Will it appear authentic or insult the intelligence?
My overall impression? Obama’s a year older than Bill was and while both are considered charismatic, Obama is moreso than Bill in ‘92. Bill was a change from Reagan and Bush and Ross Perot, which gave greater contrast to his youthful vigor. Hillary’s trying to minimize the visual contrast while maximizing the experience one. But the reality is, Obama’s resume is not as thin as she likes to portray. I don’t think she’ll win the delegate count. I still doubt she can win the popular vote in both. I think she reached her Alamo and put up a really good fight, the best of the season.
More laughers from last night’s SNL appearance here.
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March 2nd, 2008 at 9:57 am
Let’s face it, the wheels on the Clinton bus have been wobbling since Iowa.
Hillary and the incompetants around her didn’t design a campaign as much as a 150 million dollar coronation that was scheduled to take place the day after super Tuesday. Thankfully Bill’s telling it like it was after South Carolina dismissing the importance of the “black states” was the nail in the Clinton coffin. It reminded people of all of the things that they hate about the Clintons including the apparent approach of doing or saying anything to regain power.
Now Hillary runs around blaming the evil media. Previously it was the evil GOP attack machine or the evil right wing conspiracy or the evil HMO’s and evil big Pharma plotting her demise. She might just as well blame Monica’s evil thong.
Her latest tactic is to beat the fear drum implying that only her “foreign policy experience” can save us from the evil world and that Sen. Obama will be the death of us all.
What foreign policy experience was she getting while she was busy failing at reforming health care? What foreign policy experience was she getting while dodging Whitewater prosecutors or trying to help stave off Bill’s impeachment for lying about playing hide the cigar in the Oval office bathroom. The Clintons underestimate the extent to which America is yearning for good government without the business as usual lies, half truths and distortions of fact.
Hillary’s latest scurrilous attacks on Obama by accusing him of being “Missing in Action” brings Clintonian hypocracy to a new level. Rather than being Missing in Action she and Bill were “Absent With Out Leave” for most of the last term of the Clinton Presidency. I am quite confident that when Bill was elected the American public didn’t think that his last term was going to be spent discussing what “is” is or what “sexual intercourse” was. The fact that Republicans could point to this and say that had Bill been on station and not having to answer for DNA tests on blue dress fabric that Bin Laden could have been neutralized prior to 9/11 is the extent to which the GOP was able to duck any blame being placed on Bush for spending the bulk of the first eight months of his presidency playing with his chainsaw in Crawford.
The simple fact of the matter is that had the Clintons done the right thing and resigned allowing Gore to finish out the second term, Gore likely would have won re-election as president, 9/11 would have had a better chance at being stopped, the US would not have gone to war in Iraq, the US would not be an additional TRILLION DOLLARS in debt, the Chinese would not own the US economy and the world would not now be on the brink of a global economic collapse. Of course that would have interfered with Hillary’s presidential dreams and would make her staying married to Bill pointless.
The entire mess we are currently in can be traced directly to Clintonian hubris and lust for power. If anyone can point to a single principled thing that Billary has ever done I stand ready to be enlightened. Even Hillary’s senate vote on Iraq can likely be traced to her not wanting to appear weak on defence for her presidential bid. Nice to know that 4000 plus American troops and over 150,000 Iraqi men women and children had to be sacrificed on the altar of the Clintons’ sense of manifest destiny.
March 2nd, 2008 at 12:08 pm
That’s quite a stretch, blaming the stolen election, 9-11, Abu Ghraib, the profiteering, and 7+ years of GOP transgressions on the idea that resigning was honorable because of an infidelity between two consenting adults.
The dishonor, even then, belonged almost entirely to the Scaife Mellon, the GOP and its lap-poodle, the corporate broadcast media.
March 2nd, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Mr. Hayden seems to be deliberately missing the point. The reason for Bill to resign was to preserve the honour of the presidency for the good of the country and the Democratic Party.
Instead, he chose to commit perjury and drag the presidency and the country through Monica’s semen stained closet. In typical Clintonian fashion keeping Bill and Hillary in power was more important than the dignity of the office or the party that got him elected in the first place. I can’t believe that Hillary was not involved in the decsision not to resign. It is not much of a stretch to think that Hillary was involved in that decision and that the decision not to resign had much more to do with Hillary’s future presidential ambitions than (as ususal) it did for the good of the country.
I don’t think its much of a stretch to think that Gore running as an incumbent, not following on nearly four years of scandal, would have easily won enough electoral college votes to be president. Scaiffe Mellon had nothing to do with Bill not being able to keep his fly zipped or lying under oath about it afterward. The GOP had nothing to do with Billary’s amorality and bizarre view that somehow we are all somehow so much better off with their unique brand of leadership.
I am sure that if Al Gore had the luxury of choosing the ground he was to fight on (to paraphrase another of Sun Tzu’s precepts) he wouldn’t have chosen to fight on ground rendered so slippery and slimy by the Clintons.
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:18 pm
[…] 1) The key finding in SUSA’s Texas poll was “Clinton’s inroads in the final week come among voters age 35 to 49, where she is even today, after trailing by 18 points last week.” This is consistent with my report yesterday, that the Clinton campaign, instead of focusing on its core supporters (where Obama’s inroads were complete) was targeting Obama’s core - younger voters. Though they had clear success without the media catching on, it still looks, at this moment, like the effort fell short, though it did prevent the blowout victory Obama was trending toward. […]