Henninger fingers fatal Clinton flaw

Daniel Henninger, writing in today's Wall Street Journal, implicitly (and perhaps inadvertently) pins Hillary's loss on Bill. He may be onto something.

Claiming that the Democratic nomination fight boiled down to "identity politics," Henninger poses this question:

Some in the Clinton tong profess not to understand what happened to her. "We are filled with disappointment and amazement," said Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who helped deliver unto her the Keystone State. "Why haven't these results caused the superdelegates to come around?"

Did Ed Rendell ever believe that the 794 superdelegates, weeded from the party's topsoil, would decide that of the two candidates' constituencies - Hillary's "women" and "white" voters and Barack's black voters - they would stiff Sen. Obama's nearly 90% black base? So long as he led her by one delegate, this was never going to happen.

Perhaps. But why would the superdelegates collectively conclude that the black vote would be alienated if Clinton won the nomination? It's not simply because blacks "broke" for Obama. Clinton could have lost the black vote without losing the respect and affection of black voters. Obama had long ago forecast that African Americans would come to him en masse if they ever had hard evidence that he could win. Iowa provided that evidence.

It was Bill Clinton's denigration of Obama -- from the "fairy tale" comment belittling his opposition to the war to his equation of Obama's win in South Carolina with Jesse Jackson's -- that drew the racial battle lines. Without the sense of betrayal those remarks engendered -- later called and raised by Hillary's claiming "hard-working Amercians, white Americans" as her own -- the superdelegates might ultimately have bought Hillary's electoral logic.

Or perhaps not. Clinton's command of the working class white vote was at least in part a function of the campaign she chose to run. That campaign evoked her character, and it wasn't pretty. After Obama's long string of February victories, Hillary did turn the tide, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. From "John McCain has crossed the commander in chief threshold" to "I'm not bitter" buttons to "hard-working Americans, white Americans" to "JFK was assassinated in June," Clinton drove a meat cleaver through the Democratic coalition. By the time she emerged with nearly half the vote, waving her bloody side of electoral beef, the superdelegates were doubtless repelled as well as boxed in by the demographic dynamic Henninger describes.

Henninger's insight here is a mere byproduct of an ideologically blinkered assessment of Obama's true beliefs. The column's main thrust is a preposterous attempt to pin the most rigid "identity politics" on Obama himself. Never mind Obama's steadfast refusal to play the victim or any other kind of race card.

Henninger is sure that Obama views people as group members, rather than as individuals, because a) he went to Harvard Law, and b) he made this statement about factors that ought to inform judges' decisions:

Speaking last July about picking Supreme Court nominees, he said: "We need someone who's got the heart . . . the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that's the criteria by which I'll be selecting my judges." This is the language of identity politics.

Henninger implies that this statement is a paean to affirmative action. It's not. It's a response to the Court's recent hard-line rulings against individuals alleging active discrimination. To argue that the Supreme Court ought to be sensitive to the injustice done to a woman unquestionably paid less than her male co-workers for many years is very different from asserting that the Court ought to accord her preferential treatment. But such is the desperation of the hard right to pin all their own coded "identity" tags on Obama.

Joe Andrew charts a path for Hillary

In a peculiar sort of way, I think Joe Andrew inadvertently supported the concept that it's feasible for Hillary Clinton to win the nomination.

Speaking to the South Bend Tribune, Andrew said:

Andrew: The Clinton campaign is trying to turn this into a statement that I think we should end the process, as in, the primaries that come about do not matter. Of course they matter. I want to do everything I can to make sure that everybody comes out to vote in them because at the end of the day, all that really matters here is who has the most delegates.

But we also know ... that it is mathematically impossible for Senator Clinton to have more delegates on June 3, when the last primary is, than it is for Barack Obama to have them. So therefore the only way that she can actually become the nominee, just as a mathematical and statistical fact, is in order to convince superdelegates to go for her.

She has to have superdelegates do what I've done, which is to switch. I think superdelegates ought to announce as soon as they possibly can. ... The superdelegates ought to come clean.

Now we all know that superdelegates can switch. Hillary's scenario is that she comes close to sweeping the board in remaining primaries, coming within mid-single digits in NC, winning Indiana and doing better than expected in the remainder. Meanwhile, something equivalent to Wright's recent eruption hits Obama; his performance with white working class voters deteriorates and his poll numbers follow; Hillary closes out the voting season able to make at last a slanted case that she's won the popular vote. Then superdelegates can "do what I just did" -- Andrew has shown the way.

I don't think it will happen, or that Andrew is helping it to happen; the superdelegate tide continues to pull the other way. But he shows here that it could happen.

No way to pick a candidate

I am learning more than I ever wanted to know about the delegate selection process. States that go through four rounds of caucuses before naming delegates to the national convention, with delegates not legally bound to a candidate at any stage. Delegates awarded by Congressional district, with districts that have an even number of delegates almost guaranteed to split evenly. Districts awarded disproportionate numbers of delegates according to how they voted last election (or is that states? or both?). States getting bonus delegates for holding their primaries late. Superdelegates designed as a check to too much democracy.

This whole process is insane. In a hundred years, it will look as absurd as the 'rotten boroughs' of 19th century England, or tax farming in prerevolutionary France. Not to mention our own Electoral College....

What if we started from scratch? Suppose, gasp, nominations were one-citizen-one-vote affairs, with the nomination determined by an absolute popular vote total. Every voter could choose one party's primary in which to vote. If we wanted to drag out the nomination process, primaries could be held in four waves at equal intervals, with each bloc's position rotating on a four-election cycle.

I gather that the current system is designed to incent state and local party organizations to spur activism, get out their vote, etc. Maybe if I were more involved in politics I would recognize the rationale, the utility, even the necessity of this kind of motivation. But it seems to me that the downside - chaos, nonrepresentative democracy, fights over delegates rather than the votes that are supposed to determine the delegates -- outweighs the benefits.

When it comes to Constitutional matters, change should be slow, according to the principle expressed in the Declaration of Independence: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." But party rules are a different matter. The system is so dysfunctional that bold experimentation would seem to be in order.