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 Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
By Dipo Ola, CanadaJanuary 22, 2008 The democratic primary debate held in South Carolina on January 21, 2008 was as entertaining as it was illuminating. It was illuminating in that it confirmed a hitherto suspected level of competitiveness and in fact, animosity that exists between the two Democratic frontrunners, Senators Clinton and Obama. It was illuminating in that it clearly showed from their rhetoric, that the three democratic candidates seem to have settled on the Senator from Arizona as the presumptive republican nominee. It was illuminating in that the three candidates understand that one of the strongest selling points they can make to the primary audience is that each of them is the best positioned candidate to beat the Senator from Arizona in a general election. It was entertaining, in that the candidates perhaps for the first time shed the gloss and etiquette of political discourse to completely indulge their visceral responses to each other, in the process disclosing their inherent political ! strategies. Strategically, Senator Obama wishes to stay above the fray, project a presidential and honorable figure who unites all Americans by appealing to the optimistic elements in all people. He wants people to focus on the commonalities that all Americans share, and not the divisions that separate them, and in doing so, trust in him as the one candidate who will uplift and take the country forward, nationally and internationally. Only through this method will people overlook some of his weaknesses such as inexperience and substance on certain policy issues. This will also help him keep people from getting into the pernicious issue of race, for too much focus on this potentially divisive issue will be to his detriment. Senator Obama from the beginning has tried hard to be an American candidate and not an African American candidate. Hillary Clinton on the other hand, due to her political background and general personality cannot match the rarified Obama parlance, and doe! s not wish to keep the conversation on the abstractly, optimistic leve l. On the contrary, Hillary Clinton like her husband is a policy aficionado, and wants to focus on facts, figures, and harsh reality, as opposed to the gloss of general optimism. That is why she consistently sought to bring Obama down from his optimistic pedestal and question him on the hard facts, such as missed votes, inconsistent policy positions, bad policy positions. Her substance as well as her tone was strident and targeted enough to occasionally throw Obama off track, rattle him, bring into the fray, where she believes that the facts will play to her advantage. The question is whether she has succeeded. The polled democratic viewers appeared not to have responded well to the squabbles between these two candidates, but the reality is that the more Hillary is able to bring Obama down from his eloquent optimism, and into the fray of realism, the more of a chance she has of appealing to the red meat democrats who want someone who will fight for them, and not fight to inc! lude the republicans in the big national tent, which Obama seems to have in mind. This whole national tent issue leads to an interesting issue that at first sight might appear incongruous to a democratic debate, but turned out to be somewhat significant: The issue of former president Ronald Reagan. Barak Obama was taken to task by Hillary Clinton for allegedly praising the late President Reagan as a great leader, and although Obama denied this, and sought to clarify his words in a somewhat pedantic manner, there was an element of truth to Hillary Clinton’s words. This truth is one that underlies the fundamental difference between these two candidates. Hillary Clinton is a candidate whose appeal and campaign is based on the principle of fighting for the democrats against the evil republicans. She consistently made reference to having fought the republicans for 16 years, and survived to date. She also raised a general theme of her and her husband fighting the republicans, and a need to fight the republicans, a theme of ‘us against them’. She appea! ls to the anti-republican core base of democrats in the party. Obama on the other hand consistently made a reference to inclusion of independents and republicans in order to succeed politically, and in fact stated that to be his parallel method of adopting President Reagan’s political strategy, while deploring his political agenda. Obama in his rallies and commercials consistently makes reference us of the phrase: “we are one people”. He seems more geared towards a national election and reaching out to non-democrats, while Hillary’s style is the ‘hunker down’, ‘us against them’ style. The question is whose style will be more convincing, and more successful, electorally. Some voters may have said they thought Senator John Edwards had come out on top, after the debate, by staying above the slugfest of Senators Obama and Clinton, but the reality is that Senator Edwards has remained behind both candidates in the polls, both before and after the debate. So in rea! lity, the voters probably consider the ‘slugfest’ a necessary part of primary campaigning. The polls and conventional political wisdom indicate that Obama will probably win South Carolina, but that does not mean that Hillary was a loser in the larger, national debate. It would appear that Hillary has already internally conceded South Carolina to Obama, based on a number of demographic realities, but she has certainly not conceded the larger democratic populace of the country, who she was mostly auditioning for. She was showing democrats outside South Carolina her fighting spirit, and her willingness to go relentlessly against the republican boogey man. Those are the type of words that primary voters appreciate, as opposed to Obama’s ‘one people’ message, which would be more apposite in a general election where the voters are not so politically defensive or dogmatic. Ultimately this writer believes that the more defensive, visceral nature of the primary voter will triumph, and Hillary will be elected as the candidate. The question as to whether she will b! e able to change her tune and appeal to general voters, once she is elected as the democratic candidate is a much different one, considering that the democratic debate in South Carolina was viewed by the largest political debate audience in cable history. That large audience will augur well for Hillary in the primaries, but the independents and republicans who have heard the same fighting words, will remember them, come the general elections. There is also a danger that the black voters will remember the rather ruthless, dirty tactics used by Senator Clinton’s campaign against perhaps the most attractive, feasible black candidate to run for the democratic banner for President, ever. There has been a subtle wave of arrogance emanating from the Clintons, seemingly at the notion that Barak Obama would have the temerity to challenge Hillary Clinton for a nomination she had doubtless grown to believe she was entitled to. Initially, former President Clinton was condescending and disrespectful in his varied comments about Senator Obama, and then the Clinton Campaign grew subtly ruthless and scurrilous in the spreading of nasty, untrue rumors about Senator Obama’s faith, political sympathies and even his allegiance to his country. Aside from the fact that there is something troubling and indecorous about a former President and leader of the party and free world engaging in petty politics on his wife’s behalf ag! ainst an up and coming star of the same party, there is an air of undefined rankness about the substance of the ‘discourse’, that would have a large number of currently silent parties coming out in serious protest, if either of the Clintons happened to be a republican. All in all, if the blacks, the independents and the centrist republicans remember the tenor and content of this discourse in the general elections, then the Senator from New York, in the process of getting elected as the democratic candidate would have ensured that she will never be elected President of the greatest nation on earth. D.Ola
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