[Peace-discuss] They certainly can

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Dowd makes the point that Jeff St. Clair made months ago: the Clintons will 
undermine Obama, hoping he loses, so that Hillary can run against an aged and 
undoubtedly discredited McCain in four years. Some two party system...  --CGE]

	August 13, 2008
	OP-ED COLUMNIST
	Yes, She Can
	By MAUREEN DOWD
	WASHINGTON

While Obama was spending three hours watching “The Dark Knight” five time zones 
away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring “Aloha attire” and Hawaiian pupus, 
Hillary was busy planning her convention.

You can almost hear her mind whirring: She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch 
Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole 
Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to 
drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.

Now they’ve made Barry’s convention all about them — their dissatisfaction and 
revisionism and barely disguised desire to see him fail. Whatever insincere 
words of support the Clintons muster, their primal scream gets louder: He can’t 
win! He can’t close the deal! We told you so!

Hillary’s orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used 
the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to 
show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.

Her former aide Howard Wolfson fanned the divisive flames Monday on ABC News, 
arguing that Hillary would have beaten Obama in Iowa and become the nominee if 
John Edwards’s affair had come out last year — an assertion contradicted by a 
University of Iowa survey showing that far more Edwards supporters had Obama as 
their second choice.

Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama’s big 
moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds 
of being the nominee in 2012.

She’s obviously relishing Hillaryworld’s plans to have multiple rallies in 
Denver, to take out TV and print ads and to hold up signs in the hall that read 
“Denounce Nobama’s Coronation.”

In a video of a closed California fund-raiser on July 31 that surfaced on 
YouTube, Hillary was clearly receptive to having her name put in nomination and 
a roll-call vote.

She said she thought it would be good for party unity if her gals felt “that 
their voices are heard.” But that’s disingenuous. Hillary was the one who raised 
the roll-call idea at the end of May with Democrats, who were urging her to face 
the math. She said she wanted it for Chelsea, oblivious to how such a vote would 
dim Obama’s star turn. Ever since she stepped aside in June, she’s been telling 
people privately that there might have to be “a catharsis” at the convention, 
signaling she wants a Clinton crescendo.

Bill continues to howl at the moon — and any reporters in the vicinity — about 
Obama; he’s starting to make King Lear look like Ryan Seacrest.

The way the Clintons see it, there’s nothing wrong with a couple making plans 
for their future, is there? That’s the American way and, as their pal Mark Penn 
pointed out, they have American roots while Obama “is not at his center 
fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

The Clintons know that a lot of Democrats are muttering that their solipsistic 
behavior is “disgusting.” But they’re too filled with delicious schadenfreude at 
the wave of buyer’s remorse that has swept the Democratic Party; many Democrats 
are questioning whether Obama is fighting back hard enough against McCain, and 
many are wondering, given his inability to open up a lead in a country fed up 
with Republicans, if race will be an insurmountable factor.

Some Democrats wish that Obama had told the Clintons to “get in the box” or get 
lost if they can’t show more loyalty, rather than giving them back-to-back, 
prime-time speaking gigs at the convention on Tuesday and Wednesday. Al Gore 
clipped their wings in 2000, triggering their wrath by squeezing both the 
president and New York Senate candidate into speaking slots the first night and 
then ushering them out of L.A.

Wednesday will be all Bill. The networks will rerun his churlish comments from 
Africa about Obama’s readiness to lead and his South Carolina meltdowns. TV will 
have more interest in a volcanic ex-president than a genteel veep choice.

Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the 
platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning 
portrayals of women ... dampen the dreams of our daughters.” This, even though 
postmortems, including the new raft of campaign memos leaked by Clintonistas to 
The Atlantic — another move that undercuts Obama — finger Hillary’s horrendous 
management skills.

Besides the crashing egos and screeching factions working at cross purposes, 
Joshua Green writes in the magazine, Hillary’s “hesitancy and habit of avoiding 
hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.”

It would have been better to put this language in the platform: “A woman who 
wildly mismanages and bankrupts a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar campaign 
operation, and then blames sexism in society, will dampen the dreams of our 
daughters.”


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company