The post-mortems are piling up faster than Obama superdelegates. How did Hillary Clinton manage to lose what was a "lock" on the nomination? You can read about a dozen or more of these theories under "Today's List" on the left-hand sidebar. They all offer some general mash-up of "she ignored the caucuses", "she didn't manage her campaign competently", "she didn't plan for after Super Tuesday", "she never saw a gigantic political opponent on her radar until too late", and, the obvious, "she campaigned on experience in a change year".
All of these are true, but most ignore the choice that would have rendered these problems obsolete. Hillary might indeed have had a sure path to the nomination—as late as October 2002. At that point, faced with the most important political decision of the century, she blew it. Out of unadulterated political calculation, she voted for the Iraq War Resolution.
Picture the alternative reality. Hillary bravely votes against the war. WMD, post-invasion, are never found. The progressive community—right down to Cindy Sheehan, Tom Hayden, and the peaceniks at The Nation, The Huffington Post, and Mother Jones—hails her as a brave, unusually prescient progressive leader. She becomes the leading anti-war critic of the Bush Administration, out-flanking "flip-floppers" like John Kerry and John Edwards, who voted for the war before they voted against it. Mega-progressive sites like Daily Kos routinely hold up Hillary as the model Democratic Senator.
Through it all, she retains the fundraising and party infrastructure she and Bill took from the Clinton administration years, plus her always-loyal backing from older white women, the white working class and Hispanics. Only now, that infrastructure has united with the upper-crust, anti-war progressive community into an unstoppable left-of-center coalition.
In 2007, Barack Obama, an unknown first-term senator, has no rationale for his anti-war candidacy, since the most powerful person in the Democratic Party—Hillary Clinton—also was against the war, and, one-upping Obama, actually got to vote against it in the Senate as proof. Obama does not even enter the race, though his people hold out hopes that presumptive nominee Clinton maybe puts him on her short list for Veep. After all, he gives a great speech, and the kids love him.
Democratic nominee Clinton destroys Sen. John McCain in a November landslide that serves as a referendum on the war, and the prior administration she always steadfastly opposed. She rightfully becomes the first female president in American history.
Roll your eyes if you must. Beyond Obama's extraordinary talent and campaign lies his grasp of an opportunity, one that Hillary Clinton fatally provided six long years ago.
6/6/2008 6:23 AM
Mrs. Garrett wrote:
Well, though I think its a little bit of a stretch, I do think that with the turn of the country's attention from the war to the economy, people have forgotten what first attracted so many of us, even knowing so little about him, to Obama -- opposition to the Iraq War. Reply to this
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