Running an Insurgency

The superdelegates are not going to rescue Hillary Clinton. Almost every day when I open my e-mail, there's a press release announcing another conquest for Barack Obama. Aside from the drip, drip, drip signaling the erosion of Clinton's base in the party, these endorsements carry weight. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, supplies needed heft to Obama's national-security portfolio. Bob Casey, a pro-life, pro-gun senator from Pennsylvania, boosts Obama with working-class whites, guiding him through the politics of a state sometimes described as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.

Obama has yet to show that he can beat Clinton among traditional Democrats. But when 20,000 students come out on a Sunday afternoon at Penn State to hear him, it's a sure sign that something good is happening in his campaign. Penn State is not Harvard Yard. It's not a liberal bastion. It's a football school; it's where all the white linebackers come from, one pollster explains to me. These are the children of the steelworkers, the cultural descendants of Archie Bunker, and for them, the fact that Obama is black is a good thing. It means nobody gave him anything.

If you're a Democrat running for the House or Senate and you care more about your chamber than who wins the White House, then you're going to be for Obama because he brings out new people, like those kids at Penn State. Their parents might not vote for Obama because he's black, but they'll still vote Democratic for House and Senate. Clinton, on the other hand, isn't exactly a drag on the ticket in the conventional sense, but she doesn't bring out young people to the extent Obama does--though her campaign argues 20 million more women will vote if Hillary is the nominee. Still, if you're a Democrat focused on boosting the party's numbers on Capitol Hill you're more worried about Clinton alienating voters than you are about Obama doing the same. Obama's young supporters will compensate for the defections among their parents and grandparents.

The Clintons are not quitters, and that's an admirable quality. But after a certain point (think Bush and Iraq) it loses its allure. Hillary is nowhere near the tipping point, but how she fares depends on the kind of race she runs. It's legitimate to advance her ideas and her know-how, and the more she does it with a smile and a light touch, the more the voters will reward her. Her latest appearance on "The Tonight Show," where she joked about dodging sniper fire on her way to the studio, shows voters a side of her that gets lost in the day-to-day combat on the campaign trail. It's perfectly fair for her to challenge Obama on his newly minted policy prescriptions and poke at how removed he seems from working-class concerns--while showcasing her own deep knowledge of the kind of bread-and-butter issues that decide elections. But it's more than just fair; it helps render Obama battle-ready if he becomes the nominee. "We don't need a coronation in March and an evisceration in November," says John Podesta, a Clinton supporter and the founder of the progressive think tank The Center for American Progress.

The Clintonites are telling the superdelegates that the controversy over Obama's pastor is not over; imagine, the argument goes, what the Republicans will do with such rich material in the fall. That's a fair case to make, and Harold Ickes, the Clintons' longtime consigliere, is making it, as he pleads with superdelegates to hold off on making a final decision until Florida and Michigan are resolved. That could leave the nomination unsettled until the convention in Denver. Ickes was the architect of the strategy that took Teddy Kennedy's 1980 challenge to President Carter all the way to the convention. The Carter forces called Ickes "the arsonist" because he was willing to burn the party down to advance Kennedy's candidacy even though Carter held an insurmountable lead of 600 delegates. The skirmishing continued with platform fights and culminated with Kennedy snubbing Carter on stage the final night. Kennedy's speech is remembered as one of the great moments of rhetorical history. "The dream shall never die," he declared. It wasn't a concession speech; it was a call to arms. Kennedy won the convention, and Carter lost the election. "We could beat Kennedy or Khomeini," Carter aide Hamilton Jordan said later, referring to the Iranian hostage crisis that crippled Carter's presidency. "We couldn't beat both."

In the next two presidential elections, 1984 and 1988, Ickes, a stalwart Democrat and a liberal, the son of a member of FDR's cabinet, supported Jesse Jackson, whose interests did not always mesh with the party's. At those conventions, Ickes seemed comfortable taking a wrecking ball to the party on behalf of a worthy insurgent, recalls a Carter ally who asked for anonymity discussing the operative. But those were different times; Kennedy looked heroic championing universal health care and other liberal programs when compared with the more moderate incumbent. But there is no such ideological divide this time around. If there's a deadlock, she's not the one to pick up the pieces. The dynamic is reminiscent of the venerable board game Clue: if it's Hillary in the kitchen with the knife, she won't be rewarded with the nomination.

© 2008