The polls are showing that Sen. John McCain has enjoyed a great bump after choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee. Most of that is being attributed to white female voters. Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden have to come up with a
The polls are showing that Sen. John McCain has enjoyed a great bump after choosing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee. Most of that is being attributed to white female voters.
Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden have to come up with a strategy to counter Palin’s appeal. They have to develop a way to show just how ill-prepared Palin is to occupy a place just a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
It seems that Democrats have the perfect weapon to diffuse the electoral bomb from the 49th state: Hillary Clinton.
Hillary is the anti-Palin. She is everything that Palin is not. While Palin is enjoying celebrity status, Clinton has worn that status for years.
The question is, will Hillary do it? Will she step up and check the hockey mom into the boards? Well, so far, Hillary has remained in the box, deciding not to drop the gloves and bloody the upstart’s nose.
Sure, Clinton ceded all of her delegates to Obama at the convention. She ended the roll call and told her 18 million voters to back Obama. She gave a speech that seemed to touch most of the bases but was more about herself than about Obama.
Then McCain named Palin, an unknown, far-right ideologue from Alaska, and shuffled the electoral deck. McCain succeeded in taking the wind out of the Democrats’ sails and put Palin on everyone’s lips.
Palin is now chipping away white, female voters from Obama’s camp…from Hillary’s camp. But Hillary has been quiet lately. While she says she supports Obama, her support has been lackluster, and it is apparent that despite Obama giving away the store to the Clintons at the convention, they still haven’t joined the fold. No, Obama has yet to raise money to retire Hillary’s campaign debt, and I guess he hasn’t genuflected enough to Bill Clinton. But would the Clinton’s allow their lukewarm support for Obama to put McCain, the Republican, in the White House?
If Hillary isn’t out on the stump, working for the Democratic Party–not just Obama, and nailing Palin, then that certainly qualifies as lukewarm support. If she doesn’t attempt to counter the GOP’s blatant courting of her voters, that is a knife in the back of Obama. Her voters are in play simply because she put them in play. She was the one who countenanced the campaigns to make her a vice president, even when it was clear she wasn’t going to get it (and it was even clearer that she didn’t want it).
Perhaps Hillary is looking at the electoral tea leaves and sees that a McCain win won’t necessarily mean a win for McCain but just a repudiation of Obama. She can sit back and say, “I told you so,” and get ready for 2012. Four years from now, McCain will be 76 and no factor for a second term. The likely Republican contender could be Sarah Palin, the vice president. The Republicans would not be able to take it away from her, especially after they have spent so much capital promoting her as the future of the party.
Hillary will think she will be able to beat Palin. Of the two, she is easily the most qualified, and those Hillary voters will come back to her, and so will the Democrats. She probably thinks that Black voters will also come back to her if there is no strong Black candidate. After all, she had all the Black voters until Obama surprised her in Iowa.
The Clintons are petty, mean and ambitious. They may still feel cheated out of the nomination by the Obama campaign and Democratic Party leaders and the sexist media. Clinton has not said anything about Palin and has backed away from any questions about her. She isn’t speaking out, even though Palin and the Republicans have been invoking her name in the past two weeks. Palin talked about the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, and how she wants to break through in November.
Hillary knows Palin won’t break the ceiling she wants to break by becoming vice president. Hillary has designs on the White House, not the Admiral’s House. She may even feel some solidarity with Palin with that chromosome thing.
But if the Clinton’s drag their feet in trying to rally Hillary’s disaffected troops to Obama’s cause, no one should be surprised.
Lou Ransom is executive editor of the Chicago Defender. He can be reached at lransom@chicagodefender.com.
Copyright 2008 Chicago Defender. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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