How quickly things change
Senator Clinton won a pretty impressive 9.2% victory in Pennsylvania after being outspent 2:1 in that contest. She has now won the primary voting in the largest states and the battleground states that Democrats need in the fall to take the presidency, with the exception of Senator Obama’s home state. She would be well on her way to the nomination if the Democrats had a winner-take-all primary system that not only tracks the GOP system, but is the same set of rules that applies in the general election. You would think that the New York Times would be particularly pleased at this stage with the endorsement that it made of Senator Clinton just three months ago:
The early primaries produced two powerful main contenders: Hillary Clinton, the brilliant if at times harsh-sounding senator from New York; and Barack Obama, the incandescent if still undefined senator from Illinois…As Democrats look ahead to the primaries in the biggest states on Feb. 5, The Times’s editorial board strongly recommends that they select Hillary Clinton as their nominee for the 2008 presidential election…
When we endorsed Mrs. Clinton in 2006, we were certain she would continue to be a great senator, but since her higher ambitions were evident, we wondered if she could present herself as a leader to the nation. Her ideas, her comeback in New Hampshire and strong showing in Nevada, her new openness to explaining herself and not just her programs, and her abiding, powerful intellect show she is fully capable of doing just that. She is the best choice for the Democratic Party as it tries to regain the White House.
But the New York Times was not at all pleased with Senator Clinton’s 9% victory margin in Pennsylvania, going so far as to label it “inconclusive” and calling for the Democrat convention superdelegates to end the race, presumably by announcing for Senator Obama now. Here’s the NYT’s new editorial, barely 90 days later than the one above:
The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.
Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.
If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.
On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned…
It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot be won at the ballot box. Mrs. Clinton once had a big lead among the party elders, but has been steadily losing it, in large part because of her negative campaign.
The Times has a point of course. Senator Clinton’s lines of attack against the campaign of Senator Obama legitimize those same attacks by the GOP in the general election. No doubt the Times and its media bretheren had been looking forward to using the epithets of political correctness against those who dared raise the “trival” issues that caused such a stir in the recent debate, or pressed the candidate when he waffled on important matters. The longer that Senator Clinton stays in the race, the the more legitimate those attacks become, the more legitimate the media’s tough questions, or so the logic goes. No wonder the Times is upset.
(Final point: the Times has perhaps another reason to be upset. The 190,000 vote margin of victory for Clinton is smaller than the 230,000 Republicans and others who are said to have changed their registration to Democrat in Pennsylvania in 2008 to vote in the primary. Could it be that Senator Clinton’s margin of victory is partially attributable to an orchestrated campaign in the conservative New Media that the Times does not care to acknowledge?)