03/09/2008
Over a year ago, I posted an essay (1) about Sam Brownback's slim chances of getting the Republican nomination for 2008 because too many Americans don't like Catholics, particularly serious Catholics who are in the ultra-violet end of the spectrum of those who call themselves Catholic. As it came out during Mitt Romney's campaign, a lot of Americans really don't like Mormons either. Fundamentalists and evangelicals--and even protestants in the now dwindling-to-a-trickle mainstream--still don't have any use for those who aren't fundamentalists and evangelicals.
In that January 2007 essay I also predicted that Hillary Clinton would not get the nomination because too many people do not like her. I am still holding to that forecast. Even if the Democratic Party nominee is decided in a 2008 version of the smoke-filled room, the superdelegates will not want to field a candidate who would really rile up the opposition, who is detested, even if only by twenty or thirty percent of the electorate. Voters may disagree with Obama--some, especially in the Alabama part of Pennsylvania, may refuse to vote for him because he is African-American--but nobody really hates his guts. Lack of experience is also lack of history that is, lack of controversy. Obama even looks as presidential as Ronald Reagan did when the teleprompter is before him. At her best, Hillary comes off as Professor Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix.
The Illinois senator is also upheld by the three main pillars of the Democratic Party: the ghetto, the campus and affluent liberal suburbs such as those in Montgomery County, MD, where folks think that people who worry about losing jobs to immigrants are moronic bigots and that it would be dandy to have an African-American president.
For Democrats whose desire to win the White House isn't blinded by illusions and the Clinton ego, the ghetto pillar is the load-bearer. If superdelegates give Hillary the nomination, the ghetto contingent is going to get mad and start hollering that a black man's chance to be president was stolen, as it will so holler if Obama loses to McCain. Final vote counts, facts and reason will not prevail against imaginations that believe that New Orleans was deliberately flooded. The parochialism and identity politics that the Democratic Party has encouraged over the past forty years will bite it on the butt.
Knowledgeable journalists say that at this point, neither runner, especially Hillary, wants to have the other as second on the ticket. Again, Democrats who are not living in Dreamland don't want Mrs. Clinton trying for any place in the executive branch. And such Democrats also do not want Florida and Michigan redoing their primaries (which would not be full-blown, too-expensive primaries, but mail-in votes or state-sized smoke-filled rooms), especially if it's the Clintons who are pushing for the mulligans.
If Hillary does win the nomination and the presidency, she will not bring with her a mandate to address campus or affluent suburban liberal concerns such as FISA laws, torture and diversity. White working class people from small towns and cities will have been the deciding factor in her election and as one of them in New Hampshire told a reporter: I'm voting for Hillary because I hate immigrants.
(1) Sam Brownback's Catholic Rap Sheet
Copyright 2008 by Neal J. Conway