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Zero hour, the night of the excruciating Pennsylvania primary. I'm in the ballroom of the Park Hyatt hotel in Philadelphia, site of Hillary Clinton's victory speech. The place is going nuts. The floor is a teeming mass of celebrating Lifetime demographic; I haven't seen this many strong, independent women in one place since [potentially offensive gender-specific content self-censored by writer]. Clinton, who has just kicked Obama's ass all over the state, is onstage spooning out her rap.
"You know, for me, the victory we share tonight is deeply personal," Hillary says. "It was here in Pennsylvania where my grandfather started work as a boy in the lace mills. . . ."
"Really?" I say from my perch in the press balcony, nudging an HBO producer next to me. "Her grandfather worked in a lace mill? I hadn't heard that!"
"Yeah, right?" she says, laughing. "Who knew?"
But I'm catching stares now from a camera woman kneeling a few feet in front. "You clap at these things," she snaps at us. "That's what you do at these things. You clap. You should be clapping!"
I clap quietly to calm her down, sighing once she turns around. In the past, the press areas at campaign stops have always been wisecracking oases, a place where the rules of partisan politics are largely suspended. After all, this job is hard enough without having to take the subject matter seriously. But as the Obama-Clinton race has devolved into one of the all-time political death matches, the Hutu-Tutsi thing has spread even into the reporter ranks. Now, even one wrong word on the press bus can start a fight.
It's the same way with Democrats everywhere now. Seldom in American politics has the same side of a single party split into such distinct and acrimonious factions. As virtually identical as the two candidates are in their political positions, there is no longer any common cause left between Hillary lovers and Obama supporters. There is only a culture war of epic proportions, featuring some of the most unlikely and absurd combatants in the history of impassioned conflict. Ordinary suburban Americans, people who consider Tina Fey biting satire and whose only "fighting" experience has usually been against trans fats or hair loss, can now be seen running through the streets, screaming war calls like Maoist guerrillas in the jungles of Nepal.
As Hillary finishes her speech in the ballroom, plumes of confetti shoot into the air out of a pair of paper-cannons. The loudspeaker — which for hours now has been playing an agonizing loop of patriotic classic rock, with heavy emphasis on Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" — is now blasting John Cougar Mellencamp's "Our Country."
I raise an eyebrow. The song is (1) the soundtrack to a hideously overplayed truck commercial and (2) possibly, just possibly, a weird and weirdly gratuitous dig at Obama, who at that very moment was making his gloomy "I'm fucked" concession speech in Evansville, Indiana, flanked by Indiana native Mellencamp and his wife, Elaine. Is the Clinton camp trying to make a joke about the fact that Obama is grasping for the endorsement of some gnomish Eighties B-lister while Hillary is grabbing America by the balls? Yeah, this is our country, motherfucker! Suck on this!
Has it come to this? The political equivalent of "I know you are, but what am I?" On both sides, this Obama-Clinton race has turned into something very like the vicious rivalry of a pair of blood-lusting high school student bodies — Odessa Permian versus Midland Lee, only with the fate of the free world hanging in the balance.
This race has already seen such juvenilia as one would previously have considered inconceivable in a contest between two ostensibly cerebral Democratic presidential candidates, including a surprisingly serious argument over which camp had the right to invoke Rocky references in their Pennsylvania campaign rhetoric — an argument settled, amazingly, when Gov. Ed Rendell declared "by executive order" that the right was Hillary's alone. The problem has been exacerbated by the relatively minor policy differences between the two candidates, although one suspects that even if those differences were major, they would take a back seat to the emerging tribal schism now cleaving the Democratic Party — a wholesale regression to clashing teenage emotions that turns these supposedly profound electoral battles into feverish squalls of car-honking and sarcastic sloganeering.
How long before one side kidnaps the other side's mascot? Will we wake up some morning in the near future and find Obama's campaign bus taken apart and reassembled on the roof of the Indiana Statehouse? Will Obama hooligans steal Hillary's Botox kit and gleefully paint the word "suck!" at the end of every yes she can sign in Guam?
More important, when will this thing end? Is there any relief in sight?
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The short answer to this question is no, there isn't. This contest no longer has anything to do with the electoral math. After the Pennsylvania contest, Obama holds some 1,724 delegates, which include 1,488 pledged delegates and 236 superdelegates. Hillary, by contrast, has 1,593 total delegates, broken down into 1,334 pledged and 259 superdelegates.
The popular vote is a more confusing story, but even there the margin is substantial: 14,417,619 votes for Obama to 13,917,393 for Hillary. Those numbers can be skewed in several different directions, depending on one's inclinations (Obama's number is artificially low because it fails to reflect caucus-state populations; Hillary's number is artificially low because she doesn't get credit for Michigan and Florida). But either way, the final count will almost certainly favor Obama.
The fact that the race seems so closely fought now makes it hard to remember Obama's crushing streak of victories in the middle of this campaign. But the truth is that he built up so big a lead back then that even a major victory in a major state like Pennsylvania has little influence on the outcome: Hillary picked up only nine delegates on Obama in the process.
By the time the primary season officially ends on June 3rd with Montana and South Dakota, Obama will almost certainly be leading in delegates and the popular vote — but there almost certainly will be no nominee, either. The remainder of this race has therefore become a matter of each candidate making a case for his/her electability to the 300-odd superdelegates still uncommitted — people like Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, who ultimately will decide this contest at the convention.
In the meantime, one thing about this contest can be said with absolute surety: Everyone involved has lost their minds. For Clinton supporters, the race has taken on a meaning that transcends politics. One gets the sense that Hillary's campaign has become an idée fixe for any Democrat of a certain type who has ever been fucked around or disrespected or abused or disappointed. Far more than any policy position, it is Hillary's "fight to the finish" mantra that is reaching her supporters on some elemental level that is hard for outsiders to comprehend.
Her campaign has become a symbol of not giving in to those who would wish us to surrender, of defying the smug assessments of those who think they know better, of not letting someone else's diminished expectations for us — maybe those of a boss, maybe an ex-boyfriend or ex-wife, maybe a Madison Avenue ad world that tells us we have to look a certain way/age to be worth loving — rule the day. I would say that Hillary is the electoral incarnation of a Gloria Gaynor song, but Gloria Gaynor is too campy and even a little bit too black for this crowd; the vibe at Hillary events feels more like nostalgic white suburban angst, a numbing misery of a type that runs deep enough it can hear the same song over and over again in the car on the way to work for 20 consecutive years and yet still sing along to it, lips pursed defiantly in Billy Crystal's white-man's overbite, when it hears it twice, three times, even four times in the same hour. In other words, this Hillary campaign is basically Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" running for president.
If you're the kind of person who's ready to throw a chair through a window if you hear that fucking song even one more time, you're not going to get this Hillary thing. More to the point, you're not going to fit in with these crowds, which are full of featureless, angry faces, faces of the type that all us smug cleverati in the media think can be ignored, faces that have been going to boring-ass jobs every day and taking one crappy vacation a year to Puerto Vallarta and running a treadmill three times a week to help their spouses find sex with them more tolerable — you see, there we go, making jokes about them again! See, we can laugh all we want, but they won't . . . back . . . down! THEY WON'T! BACK! DOWWWWWWWN!
Somewhere in there is where you can find the emotional imperative underneath this campaign, and the reason why all the electoral math in the world doesn't mean shit to these people. Hillary calls them the "invisible Americans." There are a hell of a lot of them, and their anger is real. They don't want to hear about numbers, and they don't want to hear about Hillary bowing out for the good of the party. After Clinton's victory speech, I stop an elderly woman with orange hair who is wearing what looks like a white rayon sweater. I ask her if there would ever be a point at which she thinks Hillary should consider stepping d—
"Absolutely not!" she cries. "You never get out!"
I start to bring up the math, the delegate count—
"SHE IS GOING TO WIN!!!"
Next thing I know, this woman, in life probably someone's quiet grandmother from Lancaster County, is mugging in front of a TV camera, her hands raised in twin victory signs like Dick Nixon, shouting Hillary's name to the world.
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Watching this scene, I was struck suddenly by the genius of the Clinton campaign — and also felt myself beginning to understand why this Obama-Clinton contest may yet prove to be one of those defining cultural clashes that come along once a generation or so, like Bryan-Darrow or Ali-Frazier. It has been generally accepted by the media class that in Barack Obama we have the privilege of witnessing a rare oratorical talent, a dynamically attractive personal presence capable of taking even a step-in-shit moment like the Rev. Wright scandal and turning it into a positive through a well-timed and disarmingly seductive address on the issue of race in general.
But if we recognize that, we must also recognize what we have in Hillary Clinton: a once-in-a-generation political pugilist who, like her much smoother adversary, is amazingly capable of turning weakness into strength. Pitted against physical beauty and inspirational rhetoric, Hillary made herself the champion of everything stylistically ordinary, superficially unimpressive and ignored. And while her opponent won all the attention and admiration, all the teen-idol gushings of the beautiful people, she went for something deeper — resentment at the lack of those same things. She took an opponent who was relentless in his attempts to remain genial, positive and unifying, and managed to turn him into a divisive villain, a symbol representing every oversexed winner who ever had it too easy at the pimply kid's expense.
It's brilliant strategy, and it's working so well that Hillary now has her crowds hurling catcalls at the mere mention of anything Obama. Moreover, she's inspired such profound loyalty that her supporters no longer give a shit at all how they win, as long as they do. Like O.J. apologists who became overnight skeptics of DNA evidence, Clinton backers don't see anything wrong with winning the nomination through a brokered convention, despite being behind in the popular vote and the delegate count. "Why not?" says Don Dileo, a union organizer who worked for Hillary in Pennsylvania. "That's the system of government we have, right?"
Meanwhile, there's no shortage of Obama crazies, either — only on that side, the fanaticism is more of the throw-your-panties-onstage craze for the cool cool thing last seen swirling around the Beatles or Elvis or Shaun Cassidy. Just as the majority of the Hillary supporters I've talked to lately don't give a damn about her policy positions, so too do many Obama fans hide behind vague terms like "I like his integrity" or "He changes the paradigm." It's the same mindless devotion as the Hillary camp's "I won't back down!" Only it seems painfully personal in one case, intellectually earnest (almost comically so) in the other.
And here's the thing. Whereas the Clinton rallies seem to embrace the combative nature of this contest, in the Obama camp one frequently finds people who are deeply troubled by it. "He's been a complete gentleman," says Amala Lane, an Obama volunteer from New York who came down to Pennsylvania for the primary. "This is exactly what Obama is trying to get us beyond: this blue-state/red-state thing."
Listening to Lane — a soft-spoken, white, college-educated intellectual who worked as a teacher overseas — you can see exactly where Obama has gone wrong. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, Obama polled well among people exactly like this: liberals and college graduates. In the Full Metal Jacket paradigm, faggots and sailors. Earlier in the campaign, the Obama camp was so busy stewing over Bill Clinton's comparison of Obama's South Carolina win to Jesse Jackson's and worrying about being painted as a "black candidate" that they forgot to worry about being painted as something even worse, in American political terms: the candidate of liberal intellectuals.
With all his verbose deflections of Hillary's attacks and unconcealed annoyance over silly nonissues like his failure to wear a flag lapel pin, Obama inadvertently painted himself into a corner as a know-it-all, a pointy-head who would rather yammer in polysyllables and talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than wear the fucking American flag on his chest — as Hillary, meanwhile, was promising to "obliterate" Iran and in the process roping in hordes of nondescript suburbanites who'll crawl through the mud for "Madam President" while marching to classic rock tunes like the "Horst Wessel Song." Clinton's genius was in seeing that it was possible to play the liberal/intellectual-baiting game not only with Republicans but with Democrats — and that by forcing her opponent to take the high road, she could scour the fish-rich waters of the low road.
The result has been an epic clash, a war of cultural types that has nothing whatsoever to do with issues and everything to do with self-image. It's become a pitched fight between the fucked-over suburban little guy and the vilified intellectual, two groups that for years have felt put upon and dispossessed, for different reasons. The fact that their respective champions are identical superstar U.S. senators/multimillionaires makes the bitter hatred this schism is inspiring absurd, but it doesn't make it any less real. Or likely to end anytime soon.
[From Issue 1052 — May 15, 2008]