Clinton faces uphill battle to catch up with her rival
Hillary has developed a gift for understatement I've not previously noticed by congratulating Obama on having "a good couple of weeks".
During this "good couple of weeks" Obama has secured ten election victories and Hillary has secured none. She also, hitting a theme which I am already getting bored of, said it was time to move on from "good words to good works".
Like McCain, the mistake Hillary makes is to engage in the very thing that she is accusing her opponent of. For instance, what is this?"It's time we moved from good words to good works, from sound bites to sound solutions," she declared.
That's a sound bite isn't it? She's making a sound bite to attack sound bites. This whole thing is becoming surreal. The point surely here is that - in a 24-7 news media - all politicians produce sound bites. What Hillary, and I suspect McCain, object to is the simple fact that Obama's sound bites are having more resonance than their own. So they seek to attack his campaign as "little more than sound bites"... through sound bites of their own.
You really couldn't make this shit up.
The reason Hillary is attacking Obama in this way is because, despite her numerous protestations that the contest is essentially neck and neck, the truth is that Obama is now streaking ahead and it is becoming very hard not to acknowledge the fact that - without very large victories in both Texas and Ohio, victories which recent polls do not render likely - then it's going to be all over for Hillary come early March.
The notion that the race was still tied was dismissed yesterday by David Plouffe, a senior Obama strategist. "This is a wide, wide lead right now," he said. "I am amused when the Clinton campaign continues to say: 'Well, it's essentially a tie.' I mean, that's just lunacy."How long after March, barring a huge Clinton victory in Texas and Ohio, will Hillary be allowed to publicly snipe at the probable Democratic candidate, essentially doing the Republican party's work for them?
Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the Clinton's and would have been delighted had Hillary become the first ever female president of the United States. But her campaign has struck me as one which relied on a sense of entitlement. Once she failed to secure the nomination by Super Tuesday, there appeared to be no plan B.
The criticisms of Obama strike me as childish. There are many points in his policies where someone of Clinton's stature could be expected to challenge him - his willingness to engage with Iran being an early place where Hillary struck - but to attack him for being a good orator strikes me as an own goal. Leaders are expected to inspire, and often throughout history they have done so through the power of oration. Both Hillary and McCain only make me more aware of their own oratory shortcomings when they seek to attack Obama for possessing a skill which they both clearly lack.
But we have surely arrived at a new low in the proceedings when we find a seasoned politician of Hillary's experience attacking sound bites... with sound bites?
Tonight she gets one of the debates that she has been craving. Tonight she gets the chance to trip up Obama. And, better still, she gets it in Texas, one of the states that she has to win.
Should she not beat him decisively in Texas after this, she really will have run out of excuses, and it might be time to graciously step from the podium.
UPDATE:
There's an interesting article here about the way things feel within the Clinton camp:
"I've been there trying to turn around losing campaigns," a true-blue Clinton loyalist painfully acknowledged Tuesday. "When nothing you do is working, you get desperate. This is starting to feel desperate."
Clinton surrogates have tossed eggs everywhere, hoping something would stick. They've called Obama a wimp for refusing to debate in Wisconsin - a classic loser's ploy.
They've accused him of breaking pledges and being an empty-suited orator.
The attacks bombed - especially the lighter-than-air charges that Obama plagiarizes key portions of his campaign spiel.
Clinton is described as exhausted but undaunted. Some of her aides, however, worry she no longer has the "luxury" of just winning Ohio and Texas on March 4 to keep her chances alive - she must "win big."Ohio seems a surer bet than Texas, long thought a Hillary slam dunk but where Obama is working furiously to try to lure Latinos away. "He's having more success with us than I thought was possible," a Tex-Mex Clinton activist conceded.
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