After Pennsylvania (1)
Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker
During the contentious runup to the Pennsylvania primary, the polling numbers (national and statewide) hardly changed. A lot of commentators concluded that Obama’s Wright/Ayers/”bitter” troubles and the Clinton attacks based on them had had no effect, apart from driving Clinton’s negatives up faster than his. I’m no pollster—I have only the vaguest notion of what “internals” are—but I don’t believe it. I’m pretty sure that the onslaught levelled what otherwise would have been a steep upward curve for the big O.
The Times, in a surprisingly angry editorial (possibly reflecting the editorial board’s irritation at having been ordered to endorse Clinton), had this to say about what its headline called her “Low Road to Victory”:
The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.
Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.
Amen. One may doubt, however, that the Clinton campaign will heed exhortations of this kind. Hillary and her lieutenants, many of them, have evidently persuaded themselves that (a) it is absolutely certain that Obama would lose in November and (b) they are courageously braving the squeamish disapproval of bien pensants such as the Times (and The New Yorker) by destroying him before he can lure the Democratic Party to disaster. To the extent that they sincerely believe this, they are acting in a kind of twisted good faith—the kind that often marks those who have got hold of an end they see as justifying almost any means.
(Continued here.)
The New Yorker
During the contentious runup to the Pennsylvania primary, the polling numbers (national and statewide) hardly changed. A lot of commentators concluded that Obama’s Wright/Ayers/”bitter” troubles and the Clinton attacks based on them had had no effect, apart from driving Clinton’s negatives up faster than his. I’m no pollster—I have only the vaguest notion of what “internals” are—but I don’t believe it. I’m pretty sure that the onslaught levelled what otherwise would have been a steep upward curve for the big O.
The Times, in a surprisingly angry editorial (possibly reflecting the editorial board’s irritation at having been ordered to endorse Clinton), had this to say about what its headline called her “Low Road to Victory”:
The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.
Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.
Amen. One may doubt, however, that the Clinton campaign will heed exhortations of this kind. Hillary and her lieutenants, many of them, have evidently persuaded themselves that (a) it is absolutely certain that Obama would lose in November and (b) they are courageously braving the squeamish disapproval of bien pensants such as the Times (and The New Yorker) by destroying him before he can lure the Democratic Party to disaster. To the extent that they sincerely believe this, they are acting in a kind of twisted good faith—the kind that often marks those who have got hold of an end they see as justifying almost any means.
(Continued here.)
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