Re-Assessing The Race

by Steve Soto

I believe I should be held accountable, just like everyone else. I wrote this back in July:

Among the Top Three, Hillary is 1) electable; 2) the most capable in national security and foreign policy; 3) the most able to address the GOP negligence and abdication of responsibility here at home; and 4) the most able to do the job from the first day in office in January 2009. And she is surrounded with an A-List campaign team that has already demonstrated they will avoid some of the same problems that afflicted the Kerry effort in 2004. She and her team have already demonstrated that they will take no prisoners in dealing with the GOP, will hold the media accountable, and have the requisite toughness and yes, ruthlessness for what is ahead. After 2004, this is critical for me.

When I endorsed Hillary Clinton back in July, I assumed several things, one of them being that an A-List campaign team would execute a smart strategy. Well, they executed Mark Penn’s strategy, which was to focus on Super Tuesday and big, delegate-rich contests, and assumed they could knock out all other competitors while ignoring small states. And yet they had the evidence as early as November and well before the South Carolina debacle that her biggest challenge would come from her best-funded and most gifted competitor, a man who sold change better and earlier than she did, and who planned to compete in all 50 states in an effort to attract independent and crossover votes, piling up delegates along the way. Yet they still managed to elevate him into being her sole competitor without making a solid case for her own candidacy. Now, with that opponent still around and racking up victories in those ignored small states, her campaign was forced in essence to go dark after Super Tuesday until the large March contests in Ohio and Texas and Pennsylvania later where she still leads handily, even though the evidence was there weeks ago that Obama was building organizations in all the caucus states at a fraction of the cost that it was costing Team Clinton to run its effort and media in the larger states. But then, Mark Penn got his $5 million for that campaign strategy and those media buys, as if the lessons of 2004 and 2000 didn’t exist.

We are now being told by Team Clinton that she will not withdraw or concede, and plans to fight all the way to the convention because 1) she plans to rely upon super delegates to put her over the top; and 2) they dismiss Obama’s lead among pledged delegates, claiming that the lead is made up of caucus and small state contests and not from victories in large states, as if Obama’s success in driving up turnout amongst numerous voter groups in red and purple states is irrelevant. Hillary’s remaining game plan is to draw contrasts and go negative against Obama, count on more aggressive media coverage of him (obviously aided and abetted by her campaign), and assume he will have a poor debate performance along the way. That’s Team Clinton’s rationale for their candidacy.

Sorry, no sale. If Team Clinton made these mistakes and assumed that an opponent's momentum, and a media-assisted counter-Clinton narrative could be ignored in the primary, I now have doubts about how they would do in the general election.

Yes, Obama has holes in his game, such as his willingness to make workers pay for supplemental retirement accounts by way of employer payroll deduction, while he dismisses universal health care paid for by an individual mandate. Yes, John McCain will go after Obama on national security more than he could Clinton, and Obama will have to do better than to deflect those challenges simply with his opposition to the war. Yes, McCain and the right wing smear machine will attempt to define Obama as a terrorist sympathizer; in fact, they’ve already started to do so. And yes, Obama up to yesterday was tacking to the right to draw independent voters and crossover Republicans, an electorally understandable yet philosophically repugnant strategy to many of us in the party’s base.

But Obama gave a solid pro-working class speech yesterday in Wisconsin, calling for major investments in a green economy, a redirection of war spending towards infrastructure and other needs here at home, a speech I could have written. He has the most delegates, is running a 50-state campaign that is now drawing increasing numbers of independents, young voters, African Americans, white males, and now women as well, just as Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy intended. Hillary’s remaining pockets of strength are older voters and Hispanic voters, yet her remaining strategy is aimed at going negative at Obama late in the campaign and relying upon elected officials as her firewall against the voting choices from numerous contests across the country, an effort that will be framed as a last gasp that can only alienate her further from the groups that support Obama now while making John McCain’s job slightly easier this fall.

Up until the last several days, I felt it was politically risky for the party to put its hopes in a movement candidacy against a one-note national security candidate. I know that Hillary could beat McCain in a general election, but to me it is also undeniable that an Obama-led ticket has much greater coattails than she would. So it then comes down to whether or not Obama can go toe-to-toe with McCain and the GOP smear machine, and whether he can run truly as a Democrat instead of running as a movement candidate in it all for himself.

I am now comfortable with an Obama nomination. It was very difficult to move beyond my support for her and initial aversion to his approach and get comfortable with him intellectually. To do that, I read his recent speeches. You'll see a good deal of Democratic/progressive substance there, many of the same things I myself have been saying on the blog for years.

I think he may do just fine. He's not my first choice, and I am still uncomfortable with a movement candidacy that is built more on personality than progressive substance, but perhaps that's what it took to topple the Clinton machine. He's better on the issues now; he's good at inspiring the masses; and he seems to know already he has to set the narrative now against McCain.

Due to my disappointment with Team Clinton’s campaign strategy and effort, and knowing how her campaign now intends to overcome their mistakes, I cannot endorse her effort any longer. I continue to have the greatest respect for Peter Daou of the Clinton campaign, and for all of her supporters. And although I am supportive and impressed with the Obama campaign, it would be disingenuous of me to switch horses now. I fully plan to work for and support either Democrat in the general election, if they want such help from me.

The campaign is likely to get even more disagreeable to many of us in the coming weeks, and it has been a long and divisive Democratic campaign already. Putting a Democrat in the White House in 2009 is the only thing that matters, more so for the country than the party. The sooner this party can unite behind a candidate with a winning message and a clear understanding of our political opponents, the better.