Clinton tells Obama: “Shame on you”
And now we’ve arrived at the thing that I was really afraid was going to happen. Faced with the fact that her once inevitable rise to the Democratic nomination is hanging by little more than a thread, HillCo has turned the slime machine on full-force.
Let’s critique a couple of things. First of all, whether it was out of showing solidarity with Bill or because she really believed it, Hillary used to support NAFTA. She has a valid complaint that Obama’s mailers may make her seem to still be in support of it, but you can’t change the fact that she stood behind it before. It’s political opportunism, since places like Ohio have been hardest hit by free trade agreements like NAFTA.
Secondly, on health care. Hillary mandates that every American gets insurance of some kind under her health plan. She promises to make it affordable under some vague tax credits, but do those really work well for people trying to make it pay check to pay check? I think she knows it, because the information on her campaign website about her plan doesn’t mention the fact that she’s making the care mandatory. I’m not saying Obama’s plan is necessarily going to be better (let’s be honest, we’ll never have real health care reform until we have a government run national single payer system where the government can leverage its ridiculous buying power to force prices to the floor), but how well can mandatory care that relies on private plans work? This was a big issue of HillaryCare ‘93. What’s really changed fifteen years later?
My real problem with this outburst is, well, the outburst itself. I was worried that if things started to look bad for Hillary, she would go completely negative and scorch the earth to try and win the nomination. Last week’s debate was the first warning of this. This outburst seems to be the first real opening salvo. This is not what Democrats need. We’ve had a race that thusfar has been a clean, spirited fight between two candidates that are far above average. It’s unfortunate that Hillary has chosen to take the Karl Rove route here (pot, meet kettle) and scorch the earth.
Besides, if this race has taught us one thing, keeping a positive tone helps a hell of a lot. Obama has attracted a huge following due in no smart part to his consistent message of hope, which is something many people have seriously lacked for years now. Plus, when Hillary had an actual human moment before the New Hampshire primary, it resonated with the voters and she did well there. You would think that with the polls tightening in both of her firewall states, she would do the same, but given how her campaign has managed everything else up to this point, can we be surprised?
No matter what comes of this next week, I guess the real indication will be what happens at the convention. If the pledged delegate count stays fairly close, will she pull some backdoor shenanigans to win enough superdelegates to win a brokered convention? I seriously hope not, for everyone’s sake.
