Do the Clintons prefer McCain? If so, it’s the latest instance of McCain’s extraordinary luck

While the latest idea being floated in the Democratic race is for Hillary to be Obama’s VP, that is an obvious non-starter, says Maureen Dowd.

It’s hard to imagine that after spending her whole life playing second-fiddle to a superstar pol, Hillary wants to do it again. She’s been vice president.

Could the veep talk be a red herring? A ploy designed to distract attention from the Clintons’ real endgame?

Even some Clinton loyalists are wondering aloud if the win-at-all-costs strategy of Hillary and Bill—which continued Tuesday when Hillary tried to drag Rev. Wright back into the spotlight—is designed to rough up Obama so badly and leave the party so riven that Obama will lose in November to John McCain.

If McCain only served one term, Hillary would have one last shot. On Election Day in 2012, she’d be 65.

Why else would Hillary suggest that McCain would be a better commander in chief than Obama, and why else would Bill imply that Obama was less patriotic—and attended by more static—than McCain?…

Some top Democrats are increasingly worried that the Clintons’ divide-and-conquer strategy is nihilistic: Hillary or no democrat.

(Or, as one Democrat described it to ABC’s Jake Tapper: Hillary is going for “the Tonya Harding option”—if she can’t get the gold, kneecap her rival.)

If Dowd’s and others’ speculation is true, then it’s a further sign of John McCain’s amazing luck. It’s as though events were conspiring to help him. Consider. His campaign was apparently dead in summer ‘07 after his open-borders bill had been defeated by an unprecedented popular uprising and the violence in Iraq was so bad. While he had vanished from the media stage (but was still assiduously campaigning), Giuliani became the supposed front-runner, absorbed all the attention, and flopped spectacularly. Romney, the other main prospect, whose strategy was to start off by winning Iowa and New Hampshire, was checked by the surprise surge of Huckabee (Huckabee!) in Iowa, and then by McCain’s comeback in New Hampshire. McCain proceeded to beat Romney several times with the help of Independents and Democrats, and Romney, despite his outstanding talents, never got the support he deserved from conservative opinion makers who had some weird childish dislike of him. Fred Thompson, about whom there had been a lot of excitement as the Great Conservative Hope, fizzled. And then the surge, which had been strongly backed by McCain, succeeded in reducing the violence in Iraq. All these events came together and led to McCain’s back-from-the-dead victory for the GOP nomination.

And now we hear that the Clintons are sabotaging Obama in a deliberate move to help McCain win the presidency!

However, even without such a Clinton strategy, the conventional wisdom of the moment is that Obama has been so tarnished by the Rev. Wright connection that he cannot win the general election, and therefore McCain is president.

Which leads us to the last and most remarkable illustration of McCain’s luck: After Obama had won enough delegates so that Hillary could no longer fairly wrest the nomination from him, only then did Obama’s Wright problem suddenly emerge, followed by Obama’s self-damaging speech and other comments about his grandmother being a “typical [prejudiced] white person.” Meaning that the Dems are stuck with a nominee who (the conventional wisdom of the moment says) cannot win in November. Meaning that McCain is president. If the information on Wright had been publicized a year or six months or three months earlier, as by all rights it should have been, Obama would have been damaged earlier and Hillary would now be the Democratic victor and would be in a reasonable position to beat McCain.

Thus one highly improbable event after another has almost miraculously fallen McCain’s way, making him the likely next president. How strange and discouraging to think of this mean-spirited mediocrity as a man of destiny.

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A reader writes:

Very well done, and this in a year when the people are tired of Bush and seem eager to get the Republican Party out of the WH, and when the Dems seemed to have two good candidates running, instead of another John Kerry. And yet it looks as if they have managed to screw it up. Of course part of the problem is that there were two good candidates. If it were just Hillary, as predicted, it would be a different picture now. Meanwhile, things could still turn around, and Obama isn’t a John Kerry, he does have skill and genuine appeal that may help people overlook this other thing.

But for McCain, it is not just luck. Rather, some truth about the Dems seems to have emerged. Their unwillingness to tell blacks that the kind of vicious anti-white, anti-American radicalism represented by Wright is unacceptable. Either through liberal guilt or fear, or through some complacent attitude which says that it is insignificant that blacks talk that way, they haven’t been able to put this kind of radicalism in its place. For good, anyway. Clinton did something toward mainstreaming himself and neutralizing black hatred with his Sister Souljah moment, and a few other things he said. Enough to be elected twice while still maintaining his status as the first black president. Talk about political skill. Even now, could the Dems entertain the thought of forcing Obama to do more distancing from Wright? Even further, could they entertain maneuvering Hillary into the nomination for the good of the overall party, assuaging Obama in some way for the future, or are they still so wracked with fear and guilt that they can’t even entertain the possibility? Will they just stand by helplessly as black radicalism takes them down, and then count this as another episode enforcing the contempt they have for America for not indulging black radicalism as they do?

Sam H. writes from the Netherlands:

Interesting post on McCain, but I think we should put a different spin on it.

Catholics talk about working with grace. Isn’t the lesson of McCain that perseverance pays? I don’t like McCain any more than you, but this is a man who won’t give up. He was already 63 when he ran against Bush in 2000. He was defeated. He was bitter. Bush was popular enough in 2004 to be re-elected. McCain swallowed his pride and campaigned for his former enemy so that he could win the sympathy of Republicans. At the age of 71, he entered the arena again. He refused to drop out after his campaign basically collapsed in the summer of 2007. Everyone was telling him to quit with dignity. He was broke. He was forced to travel by himself, economy-class, on commercial airlines and haul his own luggage. He nevertheless did more events in New Hampshire than anyone else. He refused to give way. Now he seems “lucky,” but in order to be a “man of destiny” you need to be there when grace passes by. McCain is always there.

It’s a lesson for all of us. A lot can be achieved if you are willing to be disappointed. If you’re willing to keep going and coming back and back for more and more. Because every now and then things will break your way.

If only Fred Thompson had had half of McCain’s perseverance…

LA replies:

Yes, McCain’s perseverance left him in place to win New Hampshire after Huckabee’s surprise defeat of Romney in Iowa, and he gets credit for that. But his perseverance does not explain the remarkable string of further events, culminating in the precise timing of Obama’s Wright disaster, that have all set the stage for his nomination and election. It’s almost supernatural.

Also, there are people who famously persevere and instead of being blessed by grace become jokes. An example is Harold Stassen, who was defeated by Thomas Dewey for the 1948 GOP nomination and then kept running over and over for the nomination in future election cycles until his name became a byword.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 26, 2008 11:30 AM | Send