Hillary’s gender politics cheapens presidential campaign

Editor's note: I realized today that somehow, I neglected to post this column the week it was published. My apologies!

(Originally published 11/3/07)

Asked in Tuesday’s MSNBC debate whether she supported New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s plan to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton gave just the sort of meandering answer her opponents have long awaited.

The Politico’s Roger Simon called it "the worst performance of her entire campaign.

"It was not just that her answer … was at best incomprehensible and at worst misleading. It was that for two hours she dodged and weaved, parsed and stonewalled," he said.

But Clinton tried to spin the disaster into a positive, arguing that all the other candidates – all men – had engaged in "The Politics of Pile-On."

It’s no secret that Clinton has made her gender the cornerstone of her campaign. Her home page invites visitors to "Help Make History." In an endorsement, one congresswoman writes that "As women, we know that our home and work environments directly impact our lives, and that developing an effective energy policy is crucial for the long-term economic stability of our country." (Are they insinuating that men don't know these things?) And other links on the site include "Women Changing America Week" and "Winning Over GOP Women."

Clinton’s chief strategist Mark Penn said this week that “Hillary has the potential … to win almost a quarter of Republican women in the general election.” And after Tuesday night’s debate, a male focus group participant said he believed that “20 million Republican women” would vote for Clinton without telling the GOP men in their lives.

So after being targeted on Tuesday night by her presidential primary rivals, Clinton – naturally – made it about gender.

While picking up the AFSCME endorsement Wednesday, union president Gerald McEntee said, "Some of you may have seen last night’s debate. Six guys against Hillary – I’d call that a fair fight.” Later, when she spoke at her alma mater of Wellesley College, she said that the education she received at the all-women’s school had prepared her for the "all-boy's club of presidential politics."

I’m confused. Is Clinton insinuating that women should vote for her because they are women and so is she? If so, isn’t she cheapening her experience? And doesn’t that denigrate the very social progress that the election of a female president would symbolize?

Republican strategist (and adviser to GOP candidate Fred Thompson) Rich Galen warned that Clinton’s gender-based strategy may backfire.

"Americans may be perfectly happy to have a female president, but they probably do not want a female president who is going to be shattered by being put upon by men – especially if the men she is being shattered by happen to run countries like Iran and Cuba and North Korea and China," he said.

In other words, Clinton may win the sympathy of her fellow Americans. But that sympathy may drive them to vote for someone else.

* * *

South Carolina’s Democratic Party bosses decided this week to bar Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert from the state’s primary. With apologies to Sports Illustrated, the specter of Colbert on a debate stage with other presidential candidates would have been a sure sign that the apocalypse was upon us.

I enjoy good political humor as much as the next guy (or gal, Hillary). But there is a fine line between smart, witty satire and the foundational lack of respect – the visceral disgust, really – that characterizes political satire on Comedy Central, where hosts genuinely seem to hate the institutions they satirize.

None of our presidential candidates is perfect. But anyone whose reputation was made solely on bad impersonations of Bill O’Reilly should stick to armchair quarterbacking from the cheap seats.

Hillary's in trouble

(Originally published 2/16/08)

Frontrunner status is a funny thing in politics.

It’s a good thing to have at the beginning. It’s easier to raise money, get media attention, hire people and attract volunteers if you’re the brand name of the race.

But once voting starts, frontrunners must perform.

This is why Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have played hot potato with the frontrunner label since Iowa: HE’s the frontrunner! No, SHE is! No, HE is! The greater the expectations, the harder they are to meet (just ask Fred Thompson).

Obama and Clinton have traded wins across the country in what may be the most intriguing presidential primary in modern history. But Obama’s seven-state run since Super Tuesday (eight, if you count the U.S. Virgin Islands) has earned his advisers a PhD with distinction in expectation management: Not only is Obama now the undisputed frontrunner, but Clinton’s fortunes have taken such dramatic hits that her campaign is now in full damage-control mode.

Clinton held a conference call Monday with “donors, superdelegates and other supporters” wherein she struggled to convince them that “the nomination is not slipping away from her,” the New York Times reported.

Her supporters have legitimate cause for concern. Her three losses in the so-called Potomac Primaries Tuesday weren’t unexpected, but her advisers acknowledge that she may not win again until next month. And while Clinton will continue to earn delegates even in loss until then, Clinton insiders worry that a continued string of Obama victories will result in an insurmountable tsunami of momentum for him on March 4.

Even so, Clinton advisers, including longtime strategist James Carville, say plainly that a loss in any of three delegate-rich states – Texas and Ohio on March 4 (the old Super Tuesday) and Pennsylvania on April 22 – will spell doom for her campaign.

It’s a dangerous thing to bank your campaign’s fortunes on any single contest. Just ask Rudy Giuliani. He dropped out of the GOP race for president a day after finishing third in Florida, despite having spent nearly a month there.

But Giuliani’s slide began in Iowa. Once again, perception is reality: Giuliani didn’t win any contest before Florida, so in Florida, the perception that he couldn’t win among conservatives became reality. Clinton faces the same uphill battle. She’ll try to remain in the national consciousness as a winner despite the likelihood that all she’ll do for the next three weeks is lose.

* * *

The Democratic race has been so close, pundits have scoured results with electron microscopes looking for the slightest sign that the race may be tilting in one candidate’s favor.

On Tuesday night, they may have found it.

CNN exit polls showed that Obama beat Clinton among women and ran competitively with her in demographics where she had previously routed him: among white voters, seniors and voters primarily concerned with the economy.

For the neck-and-neck race to break, one candidate would have to start making inroads with the other candidate’s core supporters – and that is what appears to have happened during the Battle of the Beltway. Obama’s victories Tuesday were “built on a drastically different demographic than just a week ago,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said.

As CNN’s Gloria Borger put it, “The question is now, can Obama take this and run with it?”

* * *

On the blog this weekend, find out how much Alabamians have funneled into the presidential race so far and who’s raised the most money in Lee County: http://clarioncallerblog.blogspot.com/.

Broken crayons, and other leftover Super Tuesday thoughts

(Originally published 2/11/08)

Some leftover thoughts from Super Tuesday:

• Several right-wing pundits lamented Mike Huckabee’s better-than-expected performance in southern states. At least one opined that Huckabee’s continued presence in the GOP primary meant that the conservative wing of the party “could not coalesce” around Mitt Romney, therefore clearing the way for the success of a more moderate candidate in John McCain.
  
  Right – almost. It’s not that the conservative voters of the party “could not” coalesce around Romney. Rather, they would not coalesce around Romney, particularly because of his about-face on the social issues they hold dear.
  
  This goes to the heart of the philosophical questions confronting voters at the ballot box: Should you support the candidate with whom you most agree, or the candidate you think has the best chance of keeping the other party out of power? More importantly, is it incumbent on any individual voter who espouses a party affiliation to sacrifice his personal convictions for the best interests of that party?
  
  We’ll explore this more in coming months. But suffice it to say that the answers may lie in the way our country selects its presidential nominees.

• One Alabamian made national news Tuesday night during coverage of election returns. CNN’s Paul Begala reported that Alabama Democratic Conference Chairman Joe Reed, who is also associate executive secretary of the Alabama Education Association, had “guaranteed” a win for Hillary Clinton in this state.
  
  According to its web site, since its founding in 1960, the mission of the ADC “has been to organize and unify the black vote ... Today ADC’s influence extends into most of the counties in the state.”
  
  The Associated Press reported that 80 percent of black Alabamians supported Barack Obama on Super Tuesday, rejecting the endorsement of Clinton that the ADC had made in October.
  
  The good news for the ADC is that it appears to have succeeded in consolidating the black vote; the bad news for the ADC is that there is a serious disconnect between its leadership and the people it is supposed to represent.

• Speaking of the Democratic primary, it seems that the people of Syracuse, N.Y., have their pulse on the contest as much as anyone. Beating odds that one Syracuse University mathematics professor pegged at less than one in 1 million, Clinton and Obama tied – yes, tied – with exactly 6,001 votes each in the city’s unofficial vote tally Tuesday.
  
  Alas, absentee and provisional ballots undoubtedly tipped the scale one way or the other. But what happened in Syracuse typifies the neck-and-neck nature of this race: On Super Tuesday, Clinton won 0.4 percent more popular votes than Obama.

• Finally, you know that I love the map CNN incorporates into its election night coverage. That kind of technology adds a whole new dimension to politics.
  
  So it was a strange scene, indeed, when Karl Rove appeared on Hannity & Colmes Thursday to analyze the Democratic primary with a 23-by-17 inch dry-erase board. Throughout the segment, he held the board up with his hand and struggled to write on it with markers that lived up to their “dry” name.
  
  Rove is arguably the best tactical political mind of our time. Many believe he is singlehandedly responsible, for better or for worse, for the election and re-election of George W. Bush. Even so, while CNN anchor John King enjoys the cutting-edge, touchscreen wall map, Karl Rove is stuck with the lap board.
  
  Giving Rove that board to discuss election strategy would be like handing Michelangelo your kid’s half-broken handful of crayons you dug out of the couch and telling him to get to work on the Sistine Chapel. It’s just wrong.

Romney exit leaves McCain to mend fences

(Originally published 2/9/08)

It’s a good thing I’m a procrastinator.

Here I was, all set to analyze Super Tuesday results for you, when former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney shocked influential conservative activists in Washington Thursday with news that he was “suspending” his campaign.

That speech was his best yet. A reporter embedded with the Romney campaign for months noted that the candidate wrote it himself; key staffers didn’t see it until just hours before it was delivered in Washington.

(Sidebar: Candidates are always at their best when they use their own words to express their own ideas. Why don’t they do it more often? Consider Al Gore’s concession speech in December 2000. Gore was nothing of the robotic figure he had taken criticism for being throughout the campaign. Had he shown the country during the campaign the man he was on Dec. 13, 2000, it’s likely he would have given a victory speech on Nov. 7.)

Anyway, Romney’s grand speech managed somehow to be personal, too. As he gave way to presumed GOP nominee-to-be John McCain, the sharp attacks the two exchanged in recent weeks were forgotten, and Romney left only grace in their place. If McCain loses in November, party loyalists who view Romney’s exit as a magnanimous sacrifice will have him in the race again within two years.

For his part, McCain was walking into a den of lions, and he knew it. He has ascended to frontrunner status while being simultaneously attacked from the left and rejected by the right, so U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) reminded the combative crowd that McCain’s Senate record includes more than just campaign finance and immigration reform.

In his speech, McCain approachably yet unapologetically sought to assuage concerns that he is not an appropriate standard-bearer for the conservative principles of the GOP. To sometimes enthusiastic applause, he ticked off issues where he mirrors conservatives, but he also took his lumps by acknowledging his fights with them (his very mention of immigration brought a chorus of boos).

All in all, the speech had a cathartic feel and seemed a satisfying beginning to the inroads that McCain will have to make with the right to win the presidency. It remains to be seen, however, whether McCain will be able to master walking that tightrope between forging the indispensible alliances he needs to win and losing the well-known “maverick” character that one of my smartest friends says makes McCain the “incurable individualist” he may cross over to support in November.

But we may know sooner rather than later. After McCain’s speech, conservative bigwig Richard Viguerie detailed specific things he and others like him will be watching as McCain carries forward. Tops on the list: McCain’s choice for vice president.

Viguerie made no bones that they expect the pick to be someone with impeccable conservative credentials – as the leaders of that movement define those credentials – if McCain hopes to prove himself a true believer to doubters on the right.

Impress your less politically astute friends by explaining to them that this is why the whispers that Mike Huckabee is the odds-on favorite to be McCain’s VP are wrong. Huckabee is simply unacceptable to the Richard Vigueries of the GOP; Viguerie himself wrote a white paper on Huckabee’s record in Arkansas that “exposes his wishy-washiness and support for big government,” according to the paper’s summary.

More likely is a pick from within the right’s affirmed stable – and don’t be surprised if Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour makes the short list.

Next up: Kansas GOP caucuses, Nebraska Democratic caucuses and primaries for both parties in Louisiana and Washington today, to be followed by Democratic caucuses in Maine tomorrow. Check out my blog for more: http://clarioncallerblog.blogspot.com.

Streamlined field rumbles toward Super Tuesday

(Originally published 2/2/08)

You may remember that last summer, a woman at Barack Obama’s campaign kickoff in Birmingham told me, “I haven’t been this excited about politics since the Kennedys.”

Apparently, she’s not alone.

Obama followed a surprisingly strong victory in South Carolina Saturday with news that he would pick up endorsements from America’s First Family of Politics on Monday.

U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy and his niece, Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy, gave their blessing to Obama’s candidacy at American University in a raucous rally reminiscent of the 1960s. Ted Kennedy seemed to channel his late brothers as he delivered a thundering speech that lauded the intersection of youthful idealism and classic liberalism.

On Tuesday, John McCain won a hard-fought GOP primary in Florida, where one-time frontrunner Rudy Giuliani finished a distant third before dropping out Wednesday. Giuliani’s failed “ambush” strategy proved that you can’t allow the race to go on without you for a full month – no matter what your lead in national polls may be.

Also Wednesday, John Edwards withdrew from the Democratic field, leaving pundits to fantasize for the next 36 hours about the debate between Clinton and Obama (known at my house as “Barack-illy”) in California.

But as it turned out, the much-anticipated showdown was a congenial “conversation,” as CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer called it. On balance, it seemed that Clinton finally delivered the confident, command performance the pundits had awaited. At the end, after Clinton and Obama brushed aside a question about whether they would run together on a Democratic “dream ticket,” Republicans caught a glimpse of their worst nightmare: The two seemed to nearly embrace before glad-handing crowds thronging the stage. GOPers know that Clinton’s tactical experience plus Obama’s X-factor would equal an all but insurmountable challenge in November.

Other quick hits this week:

• GOP candidate Mitt Romney loaned his campaign another $18 million from his checkbook in January, bringing his total personal investment in the campaign to a disturbing $35 million. No word on whether his banker backs McCain.

• Romney also wins this week’s award, given for special achievement in pandering. While appearing at a Miami-area rally in a traditional Cuban shirt known as a guayabera, Romney told the crowd he “would never give money to Fidel Castro.” (Were we offering?) Romney sounded as ridiculous as he looked – almost.

• Presidential politics even found its way into the Miss America pageant Saturday. Miss Wyoming, Jenn McCafferty, introduced herself as being “from the state that moved up its presidential primary, but nobody cared.”

• Romney and Mike Huckabee are locked in a battle for the conservative vote among Republicans. Exit polls seem to indicate that a significant number of GOP voters shy away from Huckabee because they’re not sure he could win in November. What would this race look like if everyone stopped trying to outmaneuver each other and just voted their conscience? In other words, for you football fans out there, your defense may be strong, but you won’t win the Super Bowl if Tom Brady is in a walking cast; you have to play offense now and then.

OK, folks … Super-Duper Tuesday is upon us. Cable news coverage begins at 4 a.m., and I’ll be mainlining results and analysis well into the night. I’m glad the LAPD devised that huge police, fire and rescue caravan for Britney Spears; by dawn Wednesday, I might need it.

Finally, Alabamians are part of the Super Tuesday parade, so do your part: Get out there and VOTE!

South Carolina forum offered rare glimpse of real Hillary

(Originally published 1/26/08)

The presidential primaries kicked into overdrive this week.

Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney won the caucuses in Nevada (properly pronounced “nuh-VAD-ah,” as Michelle Obama learned), while John McCain edged Mike Huckabee in the GOP contest in South Carolina.

The Democrats’ South Carolina forum, co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, was held on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday Monday night. It was the first time the gloves truly came off in the contentious race. I felt like I was watching one of those old Batman shows, you know, the ones from the 60s where words would flash on the screen during a fight?

(Cue music)

You were a corporate lawyer on the board at Wal-Mart!

BAM!

You represented that slumlord in inner-city Chicago!

KA-POW!

Maybe I’m alone in this, but I appreciated that heated exchange between Barack Obama and Clinton. No candidate is as precisely scripted, carefully controlled and perfectly practiced as she. It is as if she draws confidence from being the Stepford candidate. But the slumlord line was delivered with genuine rancor, and it represented – finally – a crack in her porcelain façade. In that moment, if even for an instant, we caught a glimpse of Hillary Clinton, the fighter.

But not everyone appreciated the moment.

“How many children is this going to get health care?” John Edwards plaintively whined at one point.

I’m no fan of negative campaigning. But I do think it’s important to know whether your president has the guts for a fight. I don’t know about you, but I want someone as president who not only has a vision, but also the strength to make it happen. I want a hardheaded negotiator who can drum up legislative support for his agenda not only on the strength of the idea, but also on the strength of the argument. I want someone who isn’t going to back down when challenged. I want someone who strides into a showdown with confidence, because even the best ideas – health care for children, for example – are useless if you can’t win the fights that will make them law.

Back on the GOP side, Fred Thompson mercifully put his disappointing campaign out of its misery on Tuesday after he finished third in South Carolina. Readers who fancy yourselves campaign managers, drop me a line with your analysis of how Thompson managed to enter the race as a strong favorite and then fizzle in such spectacular fashion. Bonus points for all who can fashion their explanations without the words “unattainable” and/or “expectations.”

Thursday’s GOP forum in Florida was the polar opposite of Monday’s exciting Democratic dust-up. One pundit suggested that the candidates had agreed to be nice to each other and to attack Hillary instead.

I have just one word for what ensued:

ZZZZzzzzzzz.

I discussed the mind-numbingly boring results with a friend, and we have some ideas about how to spice things up. I’ll share them with you in coming weeks.

Finally, this week’s pundit prize is the John Moschitta Jr. Award, so named for that guy who would dress up in white coveralls and blabber on about Micro Machines in the 1980s. It goes to CNN’s Amy Holmes. Holmes and fellow pundit Roland Martin, the Moschitta runner-up, are air piranhas on CNN’s set.

Next up: South Carolina Democrats will vote in that state today; on Tuesday, all eyes turn to Florida, where we’ve seen before that anything can happen.

Time for the political two-minute drill!

College football fans have bowl season. Style mavens have Fashion Week. Movie lovers have the Oscars (but that might be a bad example this year). And political junkies have presidential primaries.

Ah, the primaries … the time every four years when obscure delis and diners make national news, when otherwise-politically irrelevant states swarm with national media more comfortable with Starbucks than meat-and-threes, when campaigns finally get to test their candidates’ mettle and when voters have their first say.

It’s like a BCS playoff!

Choosing just one thing to write about from the past week would be like restricting myself to just one thing from Whispering Oaks’ delicious smorgasbord. Who would do that to themselves?

So, in honor of the NFL’s conference championship games this weekend, I offer you the political version of the two-minute drill:

• Beware the Big Mo. Momentum is the watchword of primary season: Who has it? Who’s lost it? But savvy politicos know that while critical to candidates’ progress, momentum can also be misleading. Hillary Clinton and John McCain had the momentum coming out of New Hampshire. But the reality is that going into today’s contests in Nevada and South Carolina, Barack Obama leads Clinton in delegates 25-24, while on the GOP side, Mitt Romney leads Mike Huckabee 48-19. McCain is third with 15. Winning the nomination is all about delegates. Especially this year, when analysts have begun to raise the specter of old-fashioned floor fights to decide the nominations, the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare may end up having a political application by the time we reach the conventions in Denver and St. Paul.


• This week’s “????” award goes to CNN pundit Roland Martin. While on the desk Tuesday night, Martin made several odd comments that left his fellow talking heads wondering what he was talking about. Martin should stick to the written word; at least you can go back and read his comments until they make sense … or you pass out at your computer, whichever comes first.


• CNN’s John King gets the Best Use of Technology award. His touch-screen map (with details!) is one of the top two things about CNN’s returns coverage. (The other is Gloria Borger.) With a color-coded, detailed display of results broken down to the county, King’s presentations are a politico’s dream.


• King’s map may be cool, but Fox News Channel’s Carl Cameron is, hands down, the best political reporter on TV. Political junkies know he’s one of us. Cameron’s interesting and incisive reporting is all business, but it’s delivered with a breathless excitement that borders on sheer glee. It’s proof that he’s landed his dream job. Who else could get so excited about an interview with the elections supervisor in Dixville Notch? Cameron is known as “Campaign Carl,” and The Hollywood Reporter calls him an “uncaged political animal.” What’s not to love?


• The One-Liner of the Week belongs to former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. During CNN’s returns coverage Tuesday night, Fleischer dismissed reports that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg may be inching toward an independent run for president, calling Bloomberg’s actions “a flirtation that won’t result in a kiss.”

Temperatures will slide down into the low 20s tonight. So why not live the life of a political junkie for a few hours? Curl up with a mug of hot chocolate and watch the returns.

But don’t blame me if you find yourself watching cable news during the games tomorrow!