Fall of the House of Clinton - Peter Wehner



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Peter Wehner

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February 20, 2008 10:10 A.M.

Fall of the House of Clinton
And other political realities on the road to the White House.

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Some thoughts on where things stand after last night:

1. The House of Clinton is falling before our eyes. Hillary Clinton’s crushing loss yesterday in Wisconsin, in the wake of the wipeout she experienced in the “Potomac Primaries” and the loss of ten consecutive states, means it is extremely improbable that she will win the nomination. Everything is breaking Obama’s way. All the trends are going in his direction and he is getting stronger with every passing week. Hillary Clinton has shown no signs that she can slow, let alone stop, his momentum. She not only has to defeat him in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania; she now needs to beat him by double-digit margins.

Clinton supporters must be crestfallen. The outcome of this race now seems written in the stars.

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2. Some of us wrote the Clinton epitaph too early — but it looks like we were early rather than wrong. The fundamental point about the Democratic race remains that in 2007, Obama evened the playing field with Hillary Clinton in the two areas she was supposed to have an overwhelming advantage: money and organization. Once that occurred, it was a matter of who the better candidate was — and he wins that contest hands down. He is an extraordinary political talent; she is an average one. He comes across as likeable and charming; she and her husband come across as ambitious and ruthless. It was clear even in the latter part of 2007 that his support was spontaneous and enthusiastic while hers was obligatory and duty-bound. Once Obama won Iowa, the aura of inevitability surrounding Clinton was destroyed — and he has been able to pry away her support with some ease.

3. Last night John McCain laid out the lines of attack against Obama. Here is how McCain put it:

I will … make sure Americans are not deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history and a return to the false promises and failed policies of a tired philosophy that trusts in government more than the people.

This is the right way for Senator McCain to frame things. Barack Obama has so far been able to present himself as a kind of trans-political figure, an eloquent but essentially empty vehicle in which people could place their hopes and wishes. I have argued elsewhere [here and here] that Obama’s main weakness is not content-free speeches but his orthodox, and in some cases extreme, liberalism. Obama has never been forced to deal with this because Hillary Clinton, Obama’s equal as a liberal, could not attack his political ideology. And so until now Obama has been given a relatively free pass, even by his opponents. That is about to end.

John McCain, if he is wise (and he is), is going to make it clear to all of America that if it chooses Barack Obama as its next president, it will be selecting, for the first time in modern times, a thorough-going liberal. Americans may make that choice — but if they do, it will be groundbreaking.

4. Barack Obama helped the McCain effort last night with his long and windy speech. Clearly Obama was attempting to respond to those who have said (and fairly so) that his speeches have been eloquent but largely devoid of policy. Obama’s speech yesterday provided content — and what we find is that his policies are not particularly creative or heterodox or even all that hopeful; they are, rather, conventionally liberal (see Robert Samuelson’s excellent column here ) — and his description of America is actually fairly downbeat. So begins the descent back to earth for Barack Obama. His lofty and high-minded appeal, which has gotten him to where he is, will quickly give way to a spirited and substantive debate of the issues.

5. Senator Obama will try mightily to escape the liberal label. He will take one or two issues that outside sources (like National Journal magazine) judge to be liberal and say, in essence, that the old categories and the old charges don’t apply. Such name-calling, he will be insist, blurs rather than clarifies the issues. Obama will ridicule McCain as inartful, divisive, a figure from a distant era. And Obama will be aided in this effort by some in the press, whose teeth will grind whenever the charge of liberalism is raised.

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