Wednesday, Jun. 04, 2008
Can Hillary Unite the Party?
By Joe Klein
There she was, yet again, this time in Rapid City, S.D. This time her name was Margaret Dinock, but she was part of a national Greek chorus, haunting the rope lines of every candidate in every Democratic primary this year. As almost always, she was middle-aged and working class, with a desperate tale to tell, usually about health care. And this time, in classic Hellenic fashion on the last day of the Democratic primary season, she offered narrative punctuation: a gray sweatshirt with a picture of a vehemently orange car screeching to a halt at a highway barrier and the words THE END OF THE ROAD. I am not sure that Hillary Clinton noticed the sweatshirt, but she immediately understood what the woman was about. "Will you be able to get me health care?" Dinock asked, eyes welling, then overflowing. "I've had seizures since I was a child. I work three jobs. I can't get health insurance." Clinton squeezed her arm and listened carefully, then reassured her that everyone would be covered under the Clinton health-care plan and moved on.
Afterward, I approached Dinock -- a splendidly candid and effusive woman -- and she told a less careful version. "Look, I'm 38 years old. I'm Caucasian. I've got no kids. No one cares about people like me," she said. When I asked her what she actually did for health care, she laughed and said, "I'm on the K-Y jelly plan. I get it up the you-know-where."
Ahhh, America. As Dinock told her joke, I wondered how Hillary Clinton would have reacted if she had been there to hear it. I know how she would have reacted a year ago: with an awkward chill, a brisk Methodist propriety. These days, though, I imagine Clinton would have thrown back her head and guffawed. And maybe said something like "Ain't that the truth." That has been Hillary Clinton's story this year: she has learned how to be at ease with people like Margaret Dinock, and has come to believe that she -- and only she -- can adequately represent them in the White House. She mentions them in every speech. Actually, it's more than that: they are the throbbing heart of every speech for a candidate who, in the beginning, rarely showed any heart at all.
And yet, in the end, Clinton seemed as deluded by the Greek chorus as she'd been inspired by it. After all, Barack Obama had been hearing from the very same sorts of people all year. And if he had not been as successful in gaining the support of working-class Caucasians, that had been as much a consequence of their prejudices as it was of his Ivy-cool mien. His army of young idealists, the brilliant organizers who had built his campaign from the ground up in Iowa and elsewhere, had won this nomination fair and square, and his nervously proud African-American supporters -- never far from tears -- were every bit as moving as Clinton's suffering Caucasians.
Taken together, the Democratic Party that Clinton and Obama have assembled would make quite an army: Franklin Roosevelt's working people plus John Kennedy's college-educated young people and civil rights marchers. It is a coalition that seems to assemble only in bad times, goaded by economic depressions, social-justice crusades or ill-advised wars. This year, with more than 80% of the public thinking the country is moving in the wrong direction and even the presumed Republican nominee, John McCain, acknowledging the national jitters, the Democratic army seems poised to come together again. The sad reality is, though, that the coalition will have a chance to coalesce only if Hillary Clinton blesses the union.
Which is why Clinton's ungracious and solipsistic speech on the night of Obama's triumph was so disappointing. She acknowledged Obama briefly, as a candidate but not as the nominee, then proceeded to a paean to her working-class supporters ... and to herself. "In the millions of quiet moments, in thousands of places, you asked yourself a simple question: Who will be the strongest candidate and the strongest President?" she said, and then repeated the dubious claim that she had "won" the popular vote. She may have considered this the opening salvo in a tough round of negotiation with Obama about her place in the party and perhaps on the ticket, but it came across as yet another demonstration of her ill-concealed belief that Obama would be a defective and ultimately unsuccessful general-election candidate.
In the days before this graceless dnouement, Clinton's inner circle seemed split about how to proceed. Those closest to the candidate were bitter and had taken to rehearsing small grievances distorted by the campaign echo chamber -- that Obama's aides had exploited Clinton's gaffe when she inappropriately raised the specter of Robert Kennedy's assassination, that Obama hadn't defended Clinton sufficiently after the disgraceful attack by Father Michael Pfleger from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ, that the Obama campaign had played too rough in the Democratic Rules Committee battle, which granted the disputed Michigan and Florida delegations half representation. There was, more significantly, the lingering conviction that Obama didn't, and couldn't possibly, represent the women like Margaret Dinock who had been empowered by Clinton -- that Obama was another iteration of the effete Al GoreJohn Kerry presidential model. It seemed clear that Clinton had convinced herself that she was now that constituency's representative at the bargaining table, that the manner of her leaving the campaign was not really about her but about them.
It would be wise for Obama to grant her that conceit, up to a point. She, more than he, has the power to unite or destroy the party. The question for Clinton is, How does she go about cashing in her chips? By forcing a tough, immediate negotiation with Obama over the vice presidency and other issues or by making an immediate show of her desire to strengthen Obama for the coming fray? A number of Clinton's top advisers, especially in the finance and policy realms, thought Clinton's best course of action was to make herself immediately indispensable: offer her fund-raising team to Obama, offer to barnstorm with him through states where she did well, like Ohio and Pennsylvania, offer to mobilize her key constituencies -- like women and Latinos -- for Obama in a series of joint rallies. It seemed obvious that if she pressed her unlikely case for the vice presidency too aggressively, Obama would have to deny it or risk seeming weak and unpresidential. Given the freight train of personal baggage and supertanker-size egos the Clintons transport, it would probably be best for her not to press it at all.
The Clinton campaign has been a revelation. Her early insistence on a conservative, consultant-driven campaign was revealed as anachronistic and too synthetic in the sparkling intensity of this year's election. Her husband's strengths were humbled by his flaws; his wholesale bitterness overwhelmed his retail campaigning. But the greatest revelation was Hillary Clinton herself -- a fabulously skilled candidate and a compelling human being, one of the very rare politicians who found her soul during a campaign, rather than losing it. She needs to find a way to savor that now, without standing in the way of her party's future.