The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

« McCain vs Rush Limbaugh, Obama vs Bill Clinton | Main | "She'll Say Anything, And Change Nothing" »

24 Jan 2008 11:30 am

This Is Not About Race

The [Clintons'] ad takes one line from an Obama interview -- "The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years" -- and juxtaposes it with GOP policies that Obama has never advocated.

"Really?" a voice-over says. "Aren't those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we're in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street. Running up a $9 trillion debt. Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis. Are those the ideas Barack Obama's talking about?"

The Clinton campaign argued that it was simply quoting Obama. But in the original context, Obama was describing the dominance of Republican ideas in the 1980s and 1990s, without saying he supported them, and asserting that those ideas are of no use today.

Yesterday was revealing for me. The blog had a post linked on AOL's Welcome screen page - and I received hundreds of emails from people I don't normally read and who often don't read blogs that are as consumed with daily politics as the Dish. And what I heard overwhelmingly was a very simple message: We remember the 1990s fondly; we associate them with the Clinton family; it would be great to restore the family who last took care of us so well.

This very basic association - especially among loyal, working-class and middle class Democrats - is what the Clintons are appealing to. What they convey is simple competence and practicality. And they are definitely, wittingly or not, appealing to a more primitive style of dynastic politics, more associated with places like Pakistan and Argentina than the US. They figured that this was all they'd need. It's their party, after all.

The Obama phenomenon rattled them, and their strategy is to quash it, by any means and at any cost. They know that they do not need to win so much as they need to make Obama lose. That's the game-plan. The same emailers seemed unusually convinced that Obama was a closet Muslim and that a black man could never be elected in America. The most depressing tendencies from the right and from the left.

The more I witness this campaign, the clearer it is to me that it is not only important that Obama and McCain now win; it is a moral and political imperative that the Clintons lose.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

Permalink :: Trackback (0) :: Sphere It! ::