For now, Clinton has a strong argument for continuing. Obama leads in delegates, but that advantage is not overwhelming. Clinton still has a chance -- a pretty good one, according to an analysis posted by Michael Barone on U.S. News & World Report's Web site -- of emerging from the primaries with a lead in the popular vote, though it seems impossible for her to overtake Obama in the delegate count. Clinton's campaign song has become: Don't Stop Thinking About the Next Primary.
EJ Dionne has a new take on the Obama-Clinton race. Clinton, he writes, does still have a chance to win, if only a slight chance. What's on the line here is the amount of permanent damage the Clintons have sustained over the past several couple of months after having been respected leaders of the Democratic party. They risk taking the party down with them.
While Bill Clinton's triangulation (and his scandal) did damage the Democratic Party, Obama himself has acknowledged that Clinton was right to pull the party back from "the excesses of the '60s." Clinton, Obama told me in an interview last fall, "deserves some credit for breaking with some of those dogmas in the Democratic Party."
As for Hillary Clinton, nobody doubts her intelligence. Those who know her reject the media-built image of Clinton as a cold, calculating machine. Such a person would not inspire the loyalty she has earned from her partisans. If Obama does win, he will draw on her policies, some of which are better crafted than his own.
Yet much of this has been lost. Bill Clinton's approach to the South Carolina primary, the Clinton campaign's effort to ignore everything it once said about the irrelevance of the Florida and Michigan primaries, Hillary Clinton's willingness to say (or imply) that John McCain is better prepared to be president than Obama -- all this and more have created a ferocious backlash against the Clintons. The result is that when the word "Clinton" crosses their lips, many Democrats sound like Ken Starr, Bob Barr and the late Henry Hyde.
"Chill out" is good advice. Hillary Clinton has every right to keep fighting. But her campaign has suffered from a ricochet effect. Attacks aimed at her opponent and efforts to exaggerate her experience have weakened rather than strengthened her claim to the nomination.
This is obviously a problem for Hillary Clinton herself, but it is also very bad for a Democratic Party that cannot afford to see the entire Clinton legacy discredited.
The question becomes whether there is, in fact, something positive about the Clinton legacy. Many of us formed our view of the Democratic party and its growing corporatism more than a decade ago. What Dionne doesn't take into account is the extent to which many progressives had grown disgusted with the party long before the Clintons' 2008 campaign behaviors. By the time the campaign entered South Carolina, the links between the Clintons' characters and the character of the national party seemed clear and there wasn't much to like in either.
No one questions the notion that "Hillary Clinton has every right to keep fighting." The question has to do with the damage her campaign is doing to herself, her opponent, and non-Beltway Democrats (including her supporters) who thought we had two good candidates willing to have a clean fight. Instead, we find ourselves deeply divided.
Imagine what it would be like to wind up with a bitter and discredited Democratic president and a deeply split Democratic party majority (or minority) in Congress. Is that what we want?
