BartBlog

The Big Ace Parses the Dem Debate and McCain’s Dilemma

“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”
– Albert Camus

“It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.”
– Yogi Berra

The Big Ace sat hunched over a Scotch on the rocks at the bar; since you can’t smoke in saloons in Chicago anymore, he twiddled his unlit cheroot between thumb and forefinger, with the bartender casting an occasional wary eye to make sure he didn’t try to light it up.

“What have you got for me, Ace?” I said, slumping into the barstool next to him and ordering a beer.

“Hell of a thing, you can’t smoke in a bar in Chicago,” he fretted, staring forlornly at his virgin cigar. “You know, it’s this kind of thing that gives you liberals a bad reputation – this no-smoking-in-bars Nanny State crap. Restaurants, office buildings, oxygen tents I can see – but, bars? It’s crazy.”

I agreed with a nod and, flipping out a pocket notebook, asked him again what he had picked up from his contacts in politics and business. The following is recreated from memory and my sketchy notes.

“Did you see the Democratic debate last Thursday? It wasn’t so much that Hillary had to do so well – face it, she’s not the inspiring speaker Obama is and never will be, and racking up debating points is strictly the kind of BS the pundits care about – nobody ever says ‘oh, for joy, my candidate won on debating points!’ No, the thing she had to do was trip Obama up – make him lose his cool and say something really stupid. She needed a clip that would be played over and over in the two weeks before the Texas and Ohio primaries of an angry Obama trying to carve her up like any regular politician and eating his shoe leather in the process. Like that debate between Carter and Ford in ’76 where Ford said Eastern Europe wasn’t Communist – she needed one of those ‘what the hell?!’ moments, but she didn’t get it; she couldn’t rile him out of his ‘zone.’ Worse, of the two clips the media played post-debate, one was of her getting booed. Disaster. Obama played her like a Zen master, making his points and letting her bury herself in minutiae. In the end, who looked more presidential: The woman trying to press some thin plagiarism charge that nobody much cares about, or the guy who calmly deflected her attacks with dignity and poise?

“She realized, by the end of the debate, that it was all over — she hadn’t managed to get him to pop and she had nothing left. She’ll have to run the table, a landslide in every remaining state, to get enough delegates to win, and it just ain’t gonna happen – all the numbers are going his way. That’s why she made that John Edwards concession speech at the end – she’s going to go out classy; besides, she can run again in four years if Obama loses and she doesn’t want to go out looking like a bad sport. She’s already in plenty of trouble with her supporters: The Congressional Black Caucus is hoppin’ ass mad at her campaign for promising Obama would be vanquished on Super Tuesday; now these black politicians have to go back to their home districts and explain to the majorities who voted for Barack why they supported Hillary. Not something you want to have hanging over your head in a re-election campaign. On top of that, if Obama’s elected, what pound of flesh is he gonna demand in penance?

“Then there’s her big money supporters: these people don’t care about thousands of bucks for pizza and donuts – that comes with any campaign to pay off the volunteers – but the millions she was paying consultants and lobbyists to give her the same bum advice that has lost the presidency for the Dems in the last two presidential cycles. Just like Gore and Kerry, they had her campaigning in the big Blue States and ignoring the smaller fish – of course, Obama picked up those other states, and a couple of big ones, as well, and took the lead. She also made a huge tactical blunder by forcing Patty Solis to quit – to Hispanics, it looked like she was blaming the Latina for her failures, just the way a typical haughty white middle-class ‘gringa’ would take it out on the maid after the Lady of the House broke a vase. Besides, the guy she should have called on the carpet was that snake Mark Penn; his advice to her has been disastrous, and he’s been paying more attention to his career and his ego than her campaign. And Howard Wolfson should have also gotten the boot – he’s the least credible campaign spokesman in this race.

“Her biggest problem in this whole thing was that she was coasting on a campaign from the past and Obama was slowly and surely building a movement for the future. Frankly, I don’t know how you defeat a movement, but it sure isn’t through signs that say ‘Ready’. Who came up with that dumb slogan? Every time I saw that, I kept looking around for the signs that said ‘Set’ and ‘Go’.

“See, politics is an ‘add and ‘subtract’ game – some candidates are ‘Adders’ meaning they are always adding new people to their base of support, and others are ‘Subtractors,’ meaning as the voters see more of them, they lose support. Giuliani, Romney and Thompson are good recent examples of Subtractors – the more the public got to know them, the less they liked them. Reagan and Bill Clinton are good examples of Adders, and I’m not making any snake jokes here. Both Ronnie and Bill appealed to people beyond the party faithful, and the more you saw of them, the more you liked them. Obama has proven himself an Adder and Hillary is the Subtractor. It’s simple: Adders win elections; Subtractors don’t.

“If you’re a Subtractor, the only way you can win, as Poppy Bush did in 1988, and his boy did in 2000 and 2004, is to make your opponent look like even more of a Subtractor than you are by going full negative. Swift Boating was easy with a bumbling Subtractor like Kerry – he helped with the heavy lifting by running one of the worst presidential campaigns in modern history – but not so easy with a charismatic figure like Obama. Every negative trial balloon has been dumped on him – young; inexperienced; naïve; Islamic madrassa education; ‘Hussein’s my middle name’; Muslim heritage; questions if he’s ‘black enough’; accusations of plagiarism; charges of dirty campaign tactics; even that he’s some kind of Manchurian candidate for Al-Qaeda – but none of it stuck; he just keeps adding voters. Meanwhile, even blatantly false stories about Hillary spread like wildfire and are believed – not only has the right-wing media been slamming her for 16 years, softening up the public mind to accept this crap, but she often plays into this herself. She can’t say she wants a high-minded campaign based on the issues and then lash out at Obama five minutes later. And her campaign has made some increasingly bizarre excuses as the desperation set in – defending her negative ads in Wisconsin by saying they worked because Obama won by only 17 points, or claiming that her volunteering for McGovern in Texas in 1972 ingratiated her with Texas voters – many of them weren’t even born then, and the rest don’t really care. Heads up: McGovern wasn’t exactly popular with Texas voters in 1972 – even Democrats.

“I mean, her staff are screaming at each other in the hallways and no one can agree on anything and they breezed through $140 million bucks. It’s a really bad sign when your campaign staff is spending half the time figuring out who to pin the next loss on, rather than working full time to win, and that’s what I hear is going on in the Clinton campaign right now. She would have been better off not hiring so many of these Washington insiders and loyalists and relying on her instincts instead, but it’s too late for that. But watch for a major shake-up anyway if she doesn’t do better than a 10 point win in Texas.

“Her supporters have now been whittled down to four sub-groups: The diehard Clinton lovers who fondly recall the days of President Bill and actually want him again and not so much Hillary; upper middle-class white women over 50 who fought the good fight for women’s liberation in the ’60s and see a Hillary presidency as their ultimate victory; the DLC Democratic Party Washington establishment; and those who think it’s ‘too soon’ and America won’t vote for a black president this time around, which is really just a polite cover for their own bigotry, and that’s just not enough warm bodies to net her the nomination or elect her president.

“Going into this debate in Ohio on Feb. 26, you gotta wonder which Hillary will show up? Now she’s desperately accusing Obama of Rovian tactics, and she’s basing that charge on two things – whether she once said NAFTA would be a boon’ to the American economy and whether or not her health care plan forces people to buy health insurance. Obama’s campaign quoted the word ‘boon’ from a Newsday article that the paper later corrected, but that doesn’t invalidate the fact, although she hopes it will, that she has supported NAFTA, extremely unpopular in out-of-work Ohio. Remember the whole flap about Dan Rather’s story on Bush’s Texas Air Guard record and how it all came down to whether the documents were authentic? That was Rove’s thing – cast suspicion on the minor point of whether the document copies were authentic and invalidate the whole story. The copies were never absolutely proven to be forgeries, and couldn’t be, but the thing is, there was plenty of other evidence that Bush had skipped out on part of his Guard service that was ignored. Now Hillary’s focusing on the single word “boon” and Obama is playing Rove tricks? Please.

“On the health care thing, George Stephanopoulos a couple of Sundays ago got Hillary to admit that she would have to develop some kind of ‘enforcement mechanism’ to get people to sign up for her health care program. She didn’t specify what ‘enforcement mechanism’ she’d use, but the fact that you have one means you are planning to force people to pay for your health care plan whether they like it or not.

“Like I said – which Hillary is going to show up? Is she going to wag her finger in Obama’s face and say ‘Shame on you!’ like some peevish suburban mother telling the kids to turn that racket down? If so, she won’t add many votes, but she will scare away a lot of people under 30. I mean, did this one work with some focus group somewhere?

“And why can’t she get her message straight? It seems like every week her signs have some different line on them: ‘Experienced Leadership’ to ‘Ready for Change’ to ‘Solutions’ to this new one, which sounds like she’s selling a butter substitute, ‘Smart Choice.’ Does she really think that a new message on her signage is going to make her a winner? After he lost in New Hampshire, Obama didn’t abandon his ‘Change you can believe in’ slogan he had in Iowa; Hillary’s been through a half-dozen since.

“This all calls into question her judgment, which is a major part of good leadership: Last week she was ‘honored’ to be on the stage with Obama, after calling him a plagiarist; this week she’s calling him a liar and Rove dirty trickster. Which of these reflect her good judgment? Why would she be honored to share the stage with the contemptible human being she’s tried to make Obama out to be?

“Meanwhile, Republicans are tearing their hair out – if it’s Obama in the general election, they can’t afford to go too negative and look racist, except in the south, because they’ll lose a lot of the white suburban vote they’ve counted on since Reagan, not to mention that African-Americans will turn out in record numbers. Obama also seems to have grown a coat of Teflon; I heard from one Republican operative that they’re frustrated because nothing is sticking, except with the GOP base and, this year, the base is not getting anybody elected – it’s a big-turnout Dem year. I’m telling you, some moderate-conservative Republicans really like Obama, as well as a majority of independents, and the McCain people need those voters to have a chance at winning. Look at McCain’s dilemma: Half the GOP base hates him, he doesn’t exactly excite the other half, and he doesn’t have the oratorical skills to rise above that and broaden his appeal. Seen his speeches? He makes a few jokes and then it’s time to recite his resume, his Navy POW cred, and talk about how conservative he really is. Yawn. Also, his ‘my friends’ thing is becoming the stuff of insider ridicule – who talks like that except someone trying to sell you a lemon? – and soon it will seep out to the general public and he’ll be pegged as the silly old man who says ‘my friends’ all the time. He’s only popular with his peer group: the elderly ‘one foot on a banana peel’ crowd, and even that’s shifting.

“McCain’s other huge problem is his affiliation with Bush. There’s a poll out now where Bush is down to record lows – 19 percent approval rating and 78 percent don’t think he’s running the economy well — and that’s devastating to McCain. All the Democrats have to do is run that photo of McCain cuddling up to Bush’s shoulder about a thousand times in October and it’s all over.

“Listen, that’s all for now — I have to go pick up my kids. Take it easy.”

“See you later.”

“Not if I see you first.”