Why I am no longer sweating the Hillary campaign's small stuff

beachmom

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Tue Apr-01-08 12:24 PM
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Why I am no longer sweating the Hillary campaign's small stuff

Josh Marshall has a must read post about Hillary staying in the race and her increasingly upping the ante in the campaign:

So when people have asked me whether I think Hillary should drop out I've said I don't think she's under any obligation to do so but that I do think, with her odds now this long, she should not be running a campaign that seems to go out of its way not simply to compete but to damage the likely nominee as a general election candidate and attempt to discredit the nomination process itself.

But when I was writing out my take on her interview over the weekend with Post, I realized that I hadn't made clear enough in what I'd written, or even really in my own head, how much the two things are really combined.

As I said in that post, I don't think Hillary's claim that she's going to stay in the race through the convention in Denver is really about Denver, or staying through August or even till June. It's about keeping her troops motivated and confident so that she can keep in the game through April and May.

And here I think we see the pattern. Hillary doesn't want to run for president in 2nd or 3rd gear. It's beneath her dignity. And I don't mean that sarcastically. It really is. She's a powerful United States senator, former First Lady, etc. She wants to win. And if she's still in it she wants to run full bore with the money you need to run a serious campaign, the crowds, poll numbers, etc. She's not some Huckabee figure who's going to hang around with little chance of winning

It really is all or nothing. You've got to convince your supporters, donors and to at least some degree the media that you're really in it, and in it with a shot. Otherwise you face the classic problem of a cascade failure. Poor fundraising generates bad press stories, which depress turnout at rallies, which create more bad press stories and eventually no press stories, etc. It's no different from the precarious position any campaign faces when the odds aren't looking good.

And so we have this vicious cycle in which the longer Hillary's odds become the further she has to up the ante to keep her candidacy credible -- in other words, the more forcefully she has to question the legitimacy of the nomination process and the more aggressively she has to push the idea that Obama can't win the general election or is not qualified to be president. ...

I think there are a lot of people who would actually like to see the race play out as long as neither candidate is going out of their way to make their opponent unviable in the general. But thinking over what I've said above, I'm just not sure how realistic that is.

Hillary is doing and saying all these outrageous things because she has to in order to survive. That is all. There is no need to get worked up about what she is doing since she has no other choice, except to drop out. The above post is wise and should be the framework to gauge everything she does from now on. Even better would be if the media got an inkling to this strategy to properly interpret their moves, so the masses would get it, too. But even if that doesn't happen, we need to understand she is doing this to stay alive, and nothing we say or do can change this. Except if the voters make it abundantly clear that they have had enough. Until then, this is how it is going to be. If I can add one more piece of wisdom, the Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
Change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference

We cannot change Hillary's decision to stay in this race, which means being ruthless. What we can change is how we talk and interpret it, and focus on the good that Obama is doing.