[NYTr] The Guardian: Hillary is Not the Candidate of Hope

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by MichaelP

The Guarian - Jan 4, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2235791,00.html

Young  voters  want  to  end not only the Iraq war, but the 
US culture wars. They aim to move beyond Bush - and the Clintons

by Martin Kettle in New Hampshire

It  is  hard not to feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. She is, in so many
ways, the  perfect  presidential candidate for the Democrats. She has
the brains and the name, the money and the machine. She has worked her
passage in the Senate, has accumulated political capital and has spent
every  day of the past seven years trying to prove that she is not the
icy  feminist harridan  of  popular mythology.  More than any of her
rivals  she  has adopted the right positions, plans and priorities in
order  to  maximise public support. She has worked out how she will be
president,  and  she would  probably  be  a good one. She is still 20
points ahead of her rival Democrats in national polls.

And yet, when actual voters are given the chance to seal the deal, too
many  of them  balk,  as  they did in Iowa this week. Coming third in
Iowa,   with  more than  two-thirds  of  the  voters  choosing  other
candidates,  is  a  shocking blow  to  the  Clinton campaign. Yet the
pollsters have always known what her problem is. Her problem is that a
lot of  people  do  not  buy  into  her, while a significant minority
actively hate her. She is one of the most divisive figures in American
life, however hard she tries not to be. If elected, she would reignite
the culture wars in spite of herself. All this makes even her admirers
fear that  she is neither a winner nor what the country really needs.
And  in a year when Democrats want, above all things, to win, that is
very bad news indeed.

Bill  Clinton saw the Iowa defeat coming. Before Christmas, the former 
president  said  privately  that his wife was becoming, in effect, the
latest political  casualty  of  the Iraq war. While the war was still
raging, Hillary's  competence and experience made her an obvious safe
choice.  But  as Iraq has got easier on the ground and diminished as a
political  issue,  so the  primacy  of  the need for a candidate with
experience  has diminished too. Just as happened in 1992, Bill Clinton
observed, 2008 has become an election tailor-made for the candidate of
hope.  But  that  candidate  is not Hillary Clinton. That candidate is
Barack Obama.

Obama  is  a  talented candidate. But so is Hillary. He has mainstream 
policies.  So  does  she.  But, as Iowa dramatically proved this week,
Obama's candidacy  is all about being in the right place at the right
time.  For, just as Clinton has an electoral secret - her divisiveness
- that her supporters try to ignore until compelled to do so, so Obama
possesses an electoral secret of his own - his attraction to young and
independent  voters  -  that  opponents tend to forget until forced to
acknowledge it, as they were on Thursday night.

In  the  Iowa caucuses, Obama beat Clinton by nine points overall. But
this masks some truly spectacular detailed figures. Obama captured the
votes  of the  under-35s  in Iowa by a ratio of more than five to one
over  Clinton. Among independents, he won by nearly two-and-a-half to
one.  And  since young voters and independents are the people whom the
Democrats  most  want  to  come to the polls - and the turnout in Iowa
doubled  this  week  compared with 2004 because they did - it would be
strange indeed if these voters did not prefer a candidate who so often
positively  attracts new voters, rather than one who in many instances
positively deters them.

Behind  all  of  this  there  surely  lies something else. Many mainly 
middle-aged  and  elderly  Democrats  see  the 2008 election in almost 
Manichean  terms.  They  don't  merely  want to send a Democrat to the
White House.  They  want to get their own back on the Republicans for
eight  years of  George  Bush. They want to be vindicated at last for
their  past sufferings.  And  although  not  unaware of the Clintons'
failings,  they find it all too easy to set these failings to one side
and are  ready to rally behind Hillary as their generational avenging
angel.

The  problem  for  these  Democrats is that so many of their potential
voters don't actually think this way. These other voters - younger and
more independent,  and indeed more female - approve of bipartisanship
and less polarised politics, but they see Hillary as a barrier to such
an approach. They cannot wait for Bush to go, but they do not want to
spend the  next  four  or eight  years refighting the battles of the
Nineties or  the  Noughties.  They are less invested in the Clintons.
They  are ready, in short, to move beyond not just the Bush years but
the  Clinton years  as  well. For them, Obama's relentless message of
change  and  a new start - banal at times but eloquently expressed in
his  victory speech  in  Des Moines - resonates far more than another
call to arms against the old enemy.

In   a  recent  article  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly  that  reads  very 
presciently  post-Iowa,  the  libertarian  conservative  writer Andrew
Sullivan expressed  this  dramatically.  Obama's  candidacy, Sullivan
argued,  could  be transformational  for  America.  It  is  the  only
candidacy  in this contest that offers America the chance of calling a
truce  on  the  culture  wars that have prevailed since Vietnam and on
which every presidential election since 1968 has been fought out.

And  if  that is right, then the 2008 election may yet be a watershed.
If it takes  the  form  of a Clinton-Giuliani contest it will simply
intensify  the toxic cycle of the past 40 years and all the demeaning
Ann Coulter-Michael Moore stuff that it spawns. But if it takes a less
traditionally  partisan form,  especially  in  the  form of a now not
inconceivable  Obama-McCain contest, American politics may at last be
able  to  wrench itself out of the destructive confrontationism of the
recent past. As I argued last week when discussing Ronald Brownstein's
important new book, this is a prize massively worth winning.

Obama's  victory  in  Iowa  does not guarantee that outcome. There are
many votes to be cast in many states yet. But it does make it a little
more possible.  We  must  see  now  if  he  can  repeat it in the New
Hampshire primary  on  Tuesday  or  whether  Clinton  can emulate her
husband  with  a barnstorming recovery. An enticing few days lie ahead
here  in sub-zero New England. But the sheer possibility that the next
American  president  may be the son of an African who went to a Muslim
school as a boy - and who is not fixated about either race or religion
- seems as hopeful and potent a message as the republic could send to
itself or to an anxious world right now.