The floodgates of the media and blogosphere are about to erupt with a torrent of articles examining exactly why Sen. Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic Party’s nomination to Sen. Barack Obama when a year ago her coronation appeared to be the more likely outcome. All sorts of angles will be covered and there can be little doubt that a variety of things contributed to her narrow defeat. The sloppily run campaign engineered by pollster Mark Penn who had never before run a national campaign. The apparent profligacy of that campaign fiscally that put Sen. Clinton in such a poor position financially mid-campaign that she was forced to float a loan from her own personal funds. The omnipresence of Bill Clinton on the campaign trail and the unfortunate chain of events that transpired in South Carolina after Senator Clinton had won a narow victory in New Hampshire. The Democratic Party’s obsession with “diversity” that came up with a Rube Goldbergian system of allocating delegates by proportionality based on caucuses and primaries eschewing the traditional “winner take all” approach. The unprecedented turnout of new voters, mainly young and sometimes casting their first vote in a presidential campaign, going with the Illinois senator. But one thing stands out in my mind as doing in Senator Clinton despite her strong run in the closing primaries and that thing is her vote authorizing the president to go to war in Iraq.
If one takes a look at the electorate’s mood on a wide variety of issues over time as put forth recently by the Pew Trusts, one will see that while economic issues have come to the fore insofar as a percentage of overall concerns in terms of upticks thereof in voters’ minds, the war in Iraq remains constant. And while today we hear a lot about Obama representing change on economic issues and taking on the “special interests” in Washington we should remember back to last fall when Obama and former Senator John Edwards staked out the turf to the left of Hillary Clinton on Iraq and set the pace going into Iowa. At that time the real estate housing collapse was then just beginning to build and gasoline prices at the pump were then just reaching $3.00/gal. in California. Where they hammered away at Senator Clinton was both on her vote in October 2002 to authorize the war (although Edwards had voted that way too) and her continued responsible positions in the Senate in refusing to go along with a “pull the plug” movement among some Democrats and most prominently among Democrats in the left of the party’s base and most definitely among the more affluent and educated of Democrats and their children. It was this latter group that figured so prominently in the defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s Democratic primary in 2006 to Ned Lamont occasioning Lieberman to run as an “independent Democrat” to win reelection.
Senator Clinton should have taken the lesson of Senator Lieberman’s experience to heart but she did not until it was too late. And why should she have. In October of 2007 she was leading Senator Obama by nearly 2-1 nationally. Thus fortified, Senator Clinton embarked upon a general election strategy of running from the center rather than from the left as is traditional in the Democratic nominating process. Thus her turf was staked and she was put in the uneviable position of having to move left to counter the Edwards/Obama attacks from her left after she lost Iowa and her position on Iraq took a nearly 180 degree turn. This added to the perceptions that Senator Clinton would do or say anything to garner the nomination and bring back memories of such claims (although then they emanated mainly from Republicans) leveled against her and President Clinton during his presidency. It should also not be forgotten that despite Bill Clinton’s seeming popularity among Democrats, many in the party’s more leftward precincts never forgave him for his vote on welfare reform during his second term and the famous “triangulation” strategy put forth by his former adviser Dick Morris that won him reelection in 1996 after the Democratic Party Congressional massacre in 1994.
So there you have it. I am sure others will offer equally compelling stories as to why Senator Clinton lost emphasizing factors other than the war but in this writer’s forty years of studying U.S. politics her position on the war stands out in my eyes as the issue from which she was never able to recover.
Bill Harrison is a writer and political analyst. His writing has appeared in the American Spectator, as well as on NeoConstant and his column at Newsvine.
on Aug 20th, 2008 at 4:55 pm