Well, we now know what Hillary Clinton has been up to these past few weeks.
Ever since May 6, when she lost heavily in North Carolina and barely managed to scrape out a win in Indiana — a state which was supposed to represent her base — Clinton’s behavior has been odd, to say the least.
Barack Obama’s status as the party’s eventual nominee seemed to be a certainty rather than a mere likelihood. But Clinton ramped up her rhetoric, choosing to loudly repeat her argument that Obama couldn’t win, rather than live out the remainder of her candidacy in reserved grace.
Some of her comments, such as repeatedly asserting that working class, white citizens would never vote for Senator Obama, seemed to be nothing more than political posturing — predictable, if damaging, ploys designed to rally her supporters in the remaining contests.
Other claims, however, were less obviously useful. And far less obviously true. For example, a mainstay of her campaign this month has been the idea that she is ahead in the popular vote, which she is not. Even if one assumes that she is softening our ears to the argument in preparation for the day it becomes true, which her campaign hopes will happen after Puerto Rico, it doesn’t change the fact that telling this lie with a straight face makes her seem either manically delusional or maniacally Karl Rovian — whichever you think is worse.
But now, today, we can safely say what it was all for. We know the argument that no one but her can win over certain demographic groups, bolstered by the claim that she is the new Al Gore — winner of the popular vote, but pitied loser of the prize — it was all meant to make her irresistible as a Vice Presidential candidate.
We know because her campaign, which up to this point had been mum and ambivalent about whether she would even accept a VP spot, launched a media blitz this morning which was so orchestrated, so calculated, and so transparently contrived that it had already been picked apart and disproved by lunchtime.
First we have Bill Clinton’s brand new interview with Time Magazine, in which he implies that Hillary deserves “nothing less” than a Vice Presidential bid.
That was the opening shot.
By 9:00 a.m. on Friday, rumors were flying around in the media, most of them from CNN, about alleged “secret negotiations” between the Obama and Clinton campaigns for Vice President. And it is no secret that the rumors started with CNN — the network still counts top Clinton advisers James Carville and Paul Begala among its employees.
The scuttlebutt ranged everywhere between talks that were already underway between the two campaigns, which Obama adviser Davide Axelrod decried as false on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ and threats from CNN’s political team that Clinton’s people were planning “Open civil war” within the Democratic party if she was not offered the VP spot.
These are false. All of them. After other cable networks immediately picked up on CNN’s outlandish claims, they actually went and checked with the Obama people, who swatted down the rumors, and the stories were largely gone from the front pages and TV news updates by midday.
But these rumors, which you must remember did not come about organically, but instead via a media firestorm initiated by the Hillary campaign, are meant to do the same thing the Clintons have been doing for nearly a month: to transform the Hillary-as-VP dialog from a possibility to a foregone conclusion.
Will it work? It seems terribly draconian to me. It doesn’t just smell of the old, selfishly opportunistic, strong-armed politics that Barack Obama has campaigned against for over a year now — it reeks of it.
In the end, it will all come down to how well they sell their argument of inevitability. Will the demographics still favor their storyline a month from now? It’s hard to say. But the Obama campaign hasn’t been interested in conventional wisdom thus far, and it’s hard to imagine them starting now, suddenly buckling under the fictitious muscling of the last, most desperate vestiges of the old regime.
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