The 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.

If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”

An Open Letter to Hillary
Dear Hillary:

There was a time when I was a die hard supporter of the Clintons. One of my most cherished personal belongings is a signed letter from your husband, in a response to a letter I sent him during the Lewinski crises.

While I never looked at Bill as, "the first black president," I did look at him as being a person who understood black people and had an affinity for them. He has shown himself to be just another patronizing politician who used his black support base when it suited his needs, and shows his true colours when it comes to this race.

I am not one of those who insist that you should abandon your dream and the race for the nomination, but I do think you have done more to damage the chances of either of you to win the election in November, than you truly understand.

I will not vote for John McCain in November, but if you manage to win the nomination by continuing the insincere, sometimes racist and always divisive politics that have taken you this far, you will not get my vote... And more importantly, I suspect that a big part of the Democratic base, including the youth, will show you their back in November. I certainly will, because in this case, I cant even hold my nose and vote for you.

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