Obama and the Clintons: A Convention Hijacking

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The Democratic Party's Denver convention is over - and it was hijacked by the Clintons. So if you want to know why Barack Obama might, against all logic, lose the November presidential election to John McCain, look no further than the former "first couple."

Two of the convention's four evenings were ceded to Bill and Hillary - each gave a speech on prime-time television. Talk of appeasement - Neville Chamberlain couldn't have choreographed it better. Never before have the losers in a primary contest had such exposure.

Of course Hillary Clinton in her speech to the assembled delegates said all the right things: Obama is the party's candidate and everyone should unite around him. That's a dog bites man story.

However, she made sure to remind them that "18 million people voted for me, 18 million people, give or take, voted for Barack." According to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, "She keeps acting as if her delegates are out of her control, when she's been privately egging on people to keep her dream alive as long as possible, no matter what the cost to Obama."

Remarked Dowd, "Hillary looked as if she were straining at the bit to announce her 2012 exploratory committee."

While Hillary Clinton is in the midst of a "catharsis," according to her confidantes, her husband remains bitter about Obama's portrayal of his political tactics as having been tinged by racism.

"He was particularly upset about the race card deal," contended historian Taylor Branch, who has written a number of books about the American civil rights movement.

"There is still work to do on the Bill Clinton front," stated Howard Wolfson, Ms. Clinton's former communications director. "He feels like the Obama campaign ran against and systematically dismissed his administration's accomplishments."

Earlier this summer, Obama was blindsided from an unexpected direction - the liberal New Yorker magazine. Its July 21 cover featured Obama in Muslim garb, alongside wife Michelle sporting a large Afro and carrying an AK-47 machine gun - clearly meant to portray her as a Black Panther style radical terrorist.

The New Yorker claimed it was satirizing rumours about Obama, such as that he's a Muslim and anti-American. But if this cartoon was meant to ridicule such misconceptions it fell flat, and could only hurt Obama.

One has to wonder: Given the Clintons' clout with the New York literati, could they have had a hand in this? The New Yorker, after all, is not part of that famous "vast right wing conspiracy" they used to talk about, but rather a magazine one would have expected to be in Obama's camp. And it was strange to see the magazine playing upon Americans' fears of Islam.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that only 42 per cent of former Clinton voters classify themselves as "solidly behind" Obama, and 20 per cent plan to vote for McCain.

Many of these voters are women, and now that McCain has picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, that number is sure to grow.

The Clintons would love to see Obama lose this election, so they could have another shot at the White House in 2012. They will do "whatever it takes" to achieve that - behind the scenes, of course.

Obama has come a long way, but as long as he remains in the Clintons' shadow, he may yet not make it to the finish line.