New York Times Wants Democrat Race Over. And I Mean Like, Yesterday.
In liberal-land, they are getting scared spitless over this lengthening Democratic contest:
The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.
Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.
If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.
On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned…
…It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot be won at the ballot box. Mrs. Clinton once had a big lead among the party elders, but has been steadily losing it, in large part because of her negative campaign. If she is ever to have a hope of persuading these most loyal of Democrats to come back to her side, let alone win over the larger body of voters, she has to call off the dogs.
They want her out, Obama nominated and the whole, bloody mess of the primaries over and (hopefully) forgotten. The Times is right, I think, about the voters getting tired of it - more than one Democratic friend of mine has opined that the continual bickering between Hillary and Obama is turning them off on the whole process. This is, of course, anecdotal evidence, but I’ll bet that people around the country are saying much the same - outside of the real dyed-in-the-wool partisans for each candidate, most are probably ready for this thing to be over…and the longer it goes on, the more disinclined to vote Democrat they may end up being.
We Republicans are, of course, delighted with the whole process - Hillary we always felt we could beat but Obama worried us early on…but in the stress of the campaign, his glaring weaknesses as a candidate have come out, and we’re confident that against either one of them we’ll give a good account of ourselves. Once again we stand amazed that the battle is between two such clearly unfit candidates - and even more flabbergasted to think that one of the two dunces might be sworn in next January. But, each day has its task, and today’s task is to enjoy the show, and help McCain build up his organization for the fall.
60 comments April 23rd, 2008
