Farewell the Clintons?

The Democratic Party primaries have moved from being a gripping battle between two unique aspirants for the US Presidency - the first female president or the first African-American president - to being the gift that keeps on giving for cable news networks, the Republican Party, and the army of late night talk show pundits and humorists.

All the signs are that the Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama battle will lurch on until June, with occasional dark mutterings from the Clinton camp that they may have something on Obama that could be sprung at the Denver party convention to win votes back to their side.

One commentary on the Pennsylvania Democrat primary, which Hillary Clinton won 55-45, said that it was the worst thing that could have happened for the party. This was borne out in the next two weeks in the lead up to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.

The campaign in these two states, which between them accounted for about 20 per cent of the remaining party delegates, saw Hillary Clinton discover the white working class with a vengeance. Before various lunchtime gatherings, at the NASCAR Museum, and on the back of pick-up trucks, the liberal, Yale-educated Senator for New York discovered her inner conservative populist, offering half-cooked policy ideas such as the summer gas tax holiday, a nuclear strike on Iran if it attacked Israel, and plans to bring the OPEC oil cartel before the authority of the World Trade Organisation.

The key was not to be “elitist”. Assuming that the Pennsylvania win was due in part to Obama’s politically ill-judged comments that people turned to guns and religion because they were “bitter” with how things had turned out for them, Hillary Clinton presented herself as the one person who could save hard working white Americans from such elitism.

The term “policy wonk” was coined during the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency to capture the obsession with detail that characterised the early years of that government, but now if economists criticised the gas tax holiday as basically shifting money from road-building to oil company profits while furthering US dependence on fossil fuels, such talk was simply the stuff of the “elites”, out of touch with ordinary folk and their trials and tribulations.

At the same time, various coded references began to appear in the vocabulary of Hillary Clinton and her supporters - Hamas, Iran, Louis Farrakhan - that suggested that Barack Obama may in fact be at one with America’s critics and, worse, it enemies.

At this point, enter Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Determined to clear the name of not only himself but the black church, he launched a three-day speaking tour that actually started reasonably well - a sympathetic interview with Bill Moyers where he drew attention to his time as a US marine to suggest that one could be a critic of America and still be patriotic - but ended with a windy, bombastic lecture at the National Press Club which confirmed that suspicions about his agenda may have some foundation.

The figure of the firebrand back nationalist preacher denouncing white America for its sins, ranging from militarism and imperialism to an inability to clap to music in time, is a recognisable one that tends to have little electoral appeal beyond a geographically well-defined African-American population. Worse, he implied that, as Barack Obama’s former pastor, he could still pull strings on his former congregation member behind the scenes, even if Obama the politician had to publicly distance himself from such hot and divisive rhetoric.

Suddenly the flag of Dixie was up, and Hillary Clinton was its unlikely bearer. Appearances on the Bill O’Reilly show had FOX News conservatives musing out loud whether they had misjudged the former First Lady for the last 15 years.

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh launched “Operation Chaos” calling on his Republican-voting audience in Indiana and North Carolina to go out and vote for Hillary. Clinton supporters such as Paul Begala started saying that the Democrats can’t rely on “African-Americans and eggheads” if they want the Presidency. They need the gun-owners, the NASCAR fans, Joe Six-Pack, the bubbas - Bill Clinton knew how to get them, and so can Hillary.

And it backfired spectacularly. Obama won North Carolina, the largest state, by 56-42 per cent, and Hilary Clinton squeaked in 51-49 in predominantly white, rural and Republican Indiana. Indeed, Clinton was forced to declare herself the winner in Indiana in advance of the result being finalised, due to a bizarre hold up in vote reporting in Lake County in the state’s north, a strong Obama-voting area that sits up against Chicago and has a large African-American population (For trivia buffs, its central city is Gary, Indiana, the birthplace of Michael Jackson).

The figures on the African-American vote are now quite staggering, with 92 per cent supporting Obama in North Carolina (which has a one-third African-American population) and 94 per cent in Indiana. Given that Bill Clinton as President was actually quite popular with African-Americans, it is indicative of the failures of the Hillary Clinton campaign that this margin has kept getting worse for her with successive primaries.

The following week has seen a slow leak of the “super delegates”, the 800-odd Democrat big-wigs who could overturn the primary vote on pledge delegates if they decide that someone is “unelectable”.

The question now is when, or whether, Hillary Clinton will concede to Barack Obama, and on what terms. Although she vows to fight on, it is no longer clear what for, as she could only become the Democrat nominee if the super delegates defy the popular vote. While doing so, however, the Democrats will continue to splinter along class and racial lines, with real opportunities for the Republicans and John McCain to pick up support from disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters.

The fact that Hilary Clinton has won West Virginia this week - a gun-owning, six-pack state if ever there was one - while Obama will win big in Oregon the following week, will only further the perception of the Democrats as a house divided.

As the Republicans have won seven of the last ten Presidential elections, the Democrats are prone to get skittish at such moments. The reality is that the 2008 Presidential election is very much theirs for the winning with a half-electable candidate with half-decent policies.

George W. Bush now has a 28 per cent approval rating, lower than that of Jimmy Carter during the hostage crisis in Iran, and less than half that of Bill Clinton when he left office. John McCain can only partly distance himself from the Bush years, as he is not overturning key policies of this period - on the war in Iraq, taxes or health care.

The gusto with which the right-wing culture warriors - O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck - are lining up to bash into Obama as a reckless, unpatriotic liberal is matched by a decided lack of enthusiasm for McCain, who is perceived as a closet moderate. Even the evangelical Christians are up for overtures from the Democrats this year, following large-scale defections from the Republican camp in the 2006 Congressional elections.

If Barack Obama is the Democratic Party nominee, the question of what happens to the Clintons is on the minds of many pundits. There is some talk of a “dream ticket” with Hillary Clinton as the Vice-Presidential nominee, in order to suture together the two fragmenting strands of Democrat support. But I think this is unlikely to happen, partly because, as one Republican advisor wittily observed on CNN, Obama would need to employ a food taster in the White House to check that nothing had been slipped into his soup.

Bill Clinton’s energetic performance on the campaign trail suggests that the would-be First Husband has no intention to step back from string pulling in the party, and would find it impossible to not involve himself in the affairs of state if he ever got near the White House again.

With an African-American candidate performing so strongly in the Democratic Party primaries, questions of race were going to feature more in the 2008 US Presidential election more than ever before. It is notable that the Republicans avoid the politics of racial polarisation at this stage, and may even change the equation if they nominated someone like Condoleezza Rice as Vice-Presidential nominee.

The major problem has been that Hillary Clinton has done so much in recent months to present herself as the candidate for “white America” that it has fostered divisiveness in a party that badly needs to be inclusive if it is to with the elections in November.