Too much Clintons at the convention?

There will be a lot--perhaps more than needed. On Tuesday, Senator Hillary Clinton will have her time at the podium. But first, reportedly, convention-goers (and viewers at home) will be treated to a film about her, presumably in the style of the Man From Hope biopic shown at the 1992 convention. Then she will speak. No doubt, she will talk about her historic run for the presidency. The question for a Clinton-cynic is how much of her address will be about her and how much will be about Barack Obama?

This will be her night--which she deserves. But then the Clintons get a second night. On Wednesday, Bill Clinton will get his turn. He is supposedly disappointed that he has been relegated to "Securing America's Future" night, when speakers are supposed to tout Obama's potential as commander in chief. Clinton would rather speak on a wider range of issues. I can understand the Obama camp's concern. Remember his convention speech in 1988? (Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton's communications director during her campaign, argues that the Obama campaign still must soothe the hurt feelings Bill Clinton has after the campaign. What is this? High school? Wolfson adds, "President Clinton has his part to play as well. He needs to offer a strong argument in favor of Barack Obama's candidacy on Wednesday night, and remind everyone why he is one of the most gifted campaigners in our generation between now and November.")

Also on Wednesday night, Hillary Clinton will again be in the spotlight, when her name is placed into nomination, thanks to the munificence of the Obama campaign. So of the four nights of the convention, the Clintons will have major roles on two. Not bad for the second-place finisher. Even though Hillary Clinton racked up a lot of votes, pundits can--and will--wonder if this is excessive, given that the whole point of the convention is to move forward with Obama. Wouldn't one night have sufficed? Start with a film on HRC. When it's done, the lights go up and...there's Bill Clinton. He introduces her. And then she comes on. A nice package--all in one. Then for the next two nights, the convention would concentrate on Joe Biden and Obama.

That's not how it's going to be. Perhaps all this Clinton programming will help ease the resentment of the Hillary Hold-ons (whom I wrote about here.) If so, it will be worth it. But is it possible those die-hards cannot be satisfied and that a Clinton-drenched convention will deliver a less-than-consistent message (Obama, Obama, Obama)? Your guess--or calculation--is as good as mine.

Here's a posting I put up at the Mother Jones blog:

The morning after, the Clinton crew was unbowed. As Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night was being creamed by Barack Obama in North Carolina and eking out a narrow victory in Indiana, pundits throughout Cable News Land were pronouncing her dead, dead, dead. Tim Russert said the race was over. But when a reporter on the campaign's morning conference call, asked Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communications director, if there had been "any discussions about not going forward," he said, "No discussions." And he seemed to mean it.

On the call, Wolfson, deputy communications director Phil Singer, and chief strategist Geoff Garin were forward-looking. They claimed to be "happy" about the 1.8-percent win in Indiana--but without sounding at all jubilant about the squeaker. As for North Carolina--where she lost by 14 points--they claimed "progress" there and pointed to the fact that she beat Obama among white voters by 24 points (as if the increasing racial polarization within the Democratic primary electorate is something to celebrate). They acknowledged that Clinton had in recent weeks loaned her campaign nearly $6.5 million--and claimed it was a sign of her commitment to moving ahead and, of course, fighting for real people. They repeated the campaign's call to seat the disputed delegations of Florida and Michigan, and they indicated they were ready to rumble in the upcoming primaries. Voters in those states, Garin said, should be given the ability "to express their voice." He added, "All we are doing is suggesting the process ought to play out."

In other words, damn the pundits, full speed ahead. It appeared that Clinton--faced with three alternatives: fighting on as if nothing has changed, dropping out, or planning a graceful exit strategy--has for the time being settled on option one.

But the voyage got a lot rockier after Indiana and North Carolina. As the cable news analysts pointed out, it is now practically a mathematical certainty that Obama will end the primaries next month with a lead in pledged delegates and the popular vote, even if the results in Florida and Michigan are included. So Clinton has run out of metrics. The days of fuzzy math are over. There will be no measure by which she will be able to argue she is the voters' choice. All the campaign is left with is an opinion: Clinton can do better than Obama against John McCain in the fall. Clinton and her lieutenants do have stats to cite, notably her performance among working-class voters (meaning, white working-class voters). She has demonstrated, Wolfson maintained on the call, "a proven ability" to win over these voters, while Obama has not. This is, he added, "the crux of the argument" that the Clinton campaign will be making to the superdelegates. And in the next primary states--West Virginia (May 13), Kentucky (May 20), Oregon (May 20)--Clinton will try to show once more that she fares better among lunch-pail Democrats.

So now Clinton, who passionately insists that democracy demands that the Florida and Michigan contest be counted and that voters in the last few states be granted the opportunity to state their preferences, is left with nothing but the most elitist of strategies: she must convince party insiders--the 300 or so not-yet-committed superdelegates--to vote against the popular will of the voters who participated in the Democratic primaries and caucuses. On the conference call, I asked Garin whether his campaign is essentially stuck with a "nullification strategy." He disputed his campaign's game plan was anything like a "nullification strategy." All delegates--pledged delegates and superdelegates--have "equal moral weight in the process," he said, and the rules of the party "anticipate there will be delegates" who will make "good faith decisions."

That is so. But for Clinton to win, these superdelegates will have to say that they know better than the voters. It is certainly permissible under Democratic Party rules. But might such an action blow apart the party? There is no way for the Clinton campaign to orchestrate this strategy politely or calmly and wrap it up quickly after the primaries conclude on June 3. After all, no superdelegate commitment is solid until he or she actually votes at the convention. Even if Clinton is able to sway enough superdelegates and win the necessary number of commitments, Obama will not fold his tent and accept this as a deal done. He would fight for those superdelegates and, if need be, fight the process. There would be a bloody battle from early June until the first ballot at the convention in late August. Nullification cannot be accomplished neatly. Clinton and her crew must realize that.

I asked Garin if he foresaw any problem if the candidate with the most pledged delegates and the most popular votes was not chosen at the convention. "When we get to June 3, we'll have a very close result," he said. "This might raise the question of how close is close." He didn't answer the question.

Right now, the Clintonites are saying they're not bailing. But in for a penny, in for a pound. The only way she can triumph is by first persuading superdelegates to vote against the wishes of primary voters and caucus-goers and by then mounting an ugly fight that will last for months until the convention--a fight that would likely create consequences that would resonate far beyond the convention.

It may be full speed ahead for Clinton and her gang, but that's only because her finger is on the button and she is considering pushing it.

The Democratic primary contest has been "relatively mild." So said Hillary Clinton's communications director, Howard Wolfson, on a conference call with reporters on Tuesday morning. But in the same call, he and Phil Singer, another campaign aide, continued to whack Obama for making remarks that they blasted "as elitist and condescending." Singer added that Obama is "somewhat detached" from American voters. And Wolfson noted that the whole fuss over Obama's "bitter" comments is "an important issue." But it's a fuss fueled by the Clinton campaign, which yesterday put up an ad in which supposed Clinton supporters--average Joes and Josephines in Pennsylvania--gripe about Obama's remarks.

"It just shows how out of touch Barack Obama is," says Man 1 in the ad. (That's how the campaign identified the fellow in an email to reporters.) "I was insulted by Barack Obama," says Woman 1. And in the spot--the first negative ad in the Obama-Clinton contest that attacks an opponent by name--Woman 2 says, "I'm not clinging to my faith out of frustration and bitterness. I find my faith is very uplifting." [Correction: Howard Wolfson emails to say, "This is not the first ad that mentions an opponent by name -- we ran ads in WI urging him to debate -- he responded by saying we would say anything or do anything to win."]

Gal No. 2 gets to the heart of this non-issue. At that now-infamous San Francisco fundraiser, Obama, referring to middle-class voters in areas hit by massive job loss, said,

So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Obama's foes--in the Clinton camp and the John McCain camp--have accused him of saying people "cling" to guns and faith only because they are bitter. That's not exactly what Obama said. He noted that people in hard-pressed areas become bitter because they see the system failing them and they cling to their belief in gun rights and/or God (as well as other beliefs, such as opposition to immigrants or gay rights). Obama obviously knows that these beliefs--the good and the bad--were already deeply held before the mill jobs disappeared. Such beliefs, though, are presumably further embraced in difficult times. And given that some of these beliefs (gun rights, opposition to abortion and gay rights) tend to cut against candidates perceived as liberals, it can make things tougher for certain Democrats. This ain't in much dispute.

No doubt, Obama was trying to express what passes for a sophisticated point in our culture of debate-by-soundbites, yet he did so in a clunky manner that offered his opponents the chance to assert that he believes that faith and a love of guns come only out of frustration. There may be an argument for such a proposition. But I doubt Obama would accept it. As a former community organizer and longtime churchgoer (we all know that he goes to church), he hardly fits the bill as a secularist elitist. Yet the Clinton campaign pounced on these words to claim that the man whom they have already decried as not able to protect America as commander in chief is out of touch with real Americans. What a "mild" attack.

The communications strategy of the Hillary Clinton campaign reminds me of the old gag about the kid who killed his parents and then begged the court for mercy because he was an orphan.

Howard Wolfson, please don't now say I'm comparing you and other Clinton aides to murderers.

On Monday's conference call, Wolfson and Phil Singer were in a huff. Though Clinton that day was giving a major address outlining her proposals for dealing with the housing credit crisis, her two top spinners were not hailing her initiatives. Instead, they were beating on the Obama camp for mounting what they claimed was a mega-negative campaign against their gal.

What had their tail feathers all ruffled this morning? Well, an Obama national security adviser, retired General Tony McPeak, had compared Bill Clinton to Joe McCarthy after Clinton had made a remark that some Obama-ites believed slighted Obama's patriotism and then Gordon Fischer, a leading Obama supporter in Iowa, wrote on his own blog that this Clinton comment was "a stain on his legacy much worse, much deeper, than the one on Monica's blue dress."

Fischer quickly apologized for the remark. But that didn't stop Wolfson and Singer from pointing to this one sentence as proof, yes proof, that the Obama crew was running a super-sleazy crusade against Clinton. By the way, in the same call, they noted that Obama has so far "failed" the commander in chief test. What's their basis for such a claim? He did not win a majority of the votes in Ohio and Texas. By that standard, Clinton has "failed' the commander in chief test in more states than Obama and with more Democratic voters than he has. But I digress.

The point is this: The Clintonites denigrate Obama on one of the most critical fronts of this campaign, with Clinton herself having gone so far as to suggest that John McCain would be a better C-in-C than Obama, but then they build up these tempests-in-a-blog to play the victim. On the conference call, Singer acted so outraged over Fischer's one sentence, saying it was too awful a "personal" remark to repeat. Reality check: Bill Clinton did stain that dress; he did have an affair with a subordinate in the White House; he did put at risk his presidency and the work of thousands of people who supported him, and he did lie about it. The stain is there. Even if the impeachment crusade of the self-righteous GOPers was misguided and excessive, that does not mean Bill Clinton should get a pass on all that.

As for McPeak's comment...so what? He thought Clinton was questioning Obama's patriotism. He fired back hard. It's not a big deal--especially when James Carville, a top Clinton supporter, has called Bill Richardson "Judas" for having endorsed Obama instead of HIllary Clinton. In human history, Judas outranks McCarthy in villainy.

As I write, there's another Clinton conference call scheduled in 30 minutes. I shudder to think what new offense against humanity the Clintonites will ascribe to the Obama campaign. For a gang that's willing to blast Obama with practically anything at any time, the Clintonites are far too sensitive about the incoming. Rather than hype controversies that barely exist, they ought to stick to promoting Clinton's proposed remedies for the economy--that is, provide more light and less smoke.