JOHN BRUMMETT: With their hair afire

I liked the comment so much I quoted it in this space twice.

Joe Trippi, campaign manager for Howard Dean in 2004, said months ago that, sure, Hillary Clinton might lose to Bernie Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire. But he said she would need only to wait out the media frenzy while people ran around with their hair on fire.

After that, he said, she would proceed to Nevada, South Carolina and beyond for a conventional securing of the Democratic presidential nomination.

So Hillary got tied, not beaten, in Iowa. Then, as her wholly expected loss in New Hampshire unfolded, there indeed ensued a frenzy.

But the ones flailing around with their hair afire were the Clintons, Hillary and Bill, doing what they do--fretting, overreacting, demonizing anybody who shows political resistance to them.

It reminded me of the incident with the late and politely gentrified Tom McRae, who dared in 1990 to mount a Democratic primary challenge to Bill's re-election as governor ad nauseam. McRae hadn't much money, but he was calling near-daily news conferences to criticize something or other in Clinton's governorship.

Fearful that McRae might be making inroads, and that some of their supporters might cross over to the Republican primary to vote against Tommy Robinson, the Clintons schemed to have Hillary only so happen to walk through the Capitol rotunda as McRae was holding such a news conference.

Hillary became so faux-spontaneously overcome by the outrage of the unjust charges that she was faux-accidentally overhearing that she couldn't help but shout, "Oh, Tom, give me a break," and open a debate right there.

McRae, never expecting the incivility of a shrieking interruption by his opponent's wife, fumbled his way through the contrived confrontation.

Sanders hasn't fumbled through anything, and it's about to drive the Clintons nuts.

Instead Bernie is mobilizing young voters--especially young women who weren't born when Hillary was a feminist pioneer, and who don't think Hillary must become president for the goal of women's rights to be achieved. Bernie also benefits from the adoration of young people born after the Cold War who may not harbor the instinctive aversion to the word "socialism" that so dominated the lives of those of us walking around in the '50s through the '80s.

By mobilizing young voters and generating enthusiasm, Sanders robs Hillary of the Barack Obama campaign coalition, even as she is otherwise defending the incumbent president's legacy and thus carrying his baggage.

So on Sunday afternoon, while Hillary was in Flint working on the African American vote that will save her, Bill got up at a rally in New Hampshire and, to the extent that he is still able, railed against Sanders' supposedly unfair assertion--but which actually is inarguably accurate--that Hillary is the candidate of the "establishment," meaning the Democratic super-delegates and the corporate world, mainly.

Then Bill went off on Sanders-supporting online commenters who have been keyboarding nasty posts about Hillary--as if Sanders was responsible for the behavior of all his supporters, and as if coarse, crude, vulgar, absurd and almost-always cowardly anonymous comments via the Internet are anything new or inordinately applied to Hillary.

If you want to see online abuse, go to my Facebook page and see what Hillary supporters say to me when I contend there's no more obligation for a woman to vote for Hillary than for Carly Fiorina or Sarah Palin or, worse yet, Courtney Goodson.

David Axelrod, the former adviser to Obama who now analyzes for CNN, got it right when he said the Clintons are overreacting.

He also said rightly that Bill is not effective as a Hillary-defender. He blamed the same personal emotional investment that had the former president making a bit of spectacle of himself in assailing Obama in 2008.

But it's more than that. Bill is ineffective as a political hatchet-man in part because his voice is now weak--literally, I mean. And he's ineffective because he has fashioned a post-presidency style of carefully explanatory world statesmanship, one that doesn't serve him well in raw politics. He trivializes himself.

Bill has called Sanders a politician-as-usual, which is partly true. But being an independent and democratic socialist who has raised giant sums of money in tiny corporate-eschewed contributions is actually unusual. And Bill is essentially criticizing Sanders as no better than Hillary.

It's hard to buy the notion of Sanders as a Hillary-abusing villain when he declines to attack her over the emails and declares at a debate that he respects her and that, even on their worst days, he and she are a hundred times better than the Republicans.

Hillary and Bill should proceed calmly and diligently to the conventional if uninspiring nomination that awaits.

They should take extinguishers in hand and put each other's hair out.

------------v------------

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 02/11/2016

Upcoming Events