
- Hillary
Since 2008 republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin was unveiled at the RNC this past week she has proven to be a wild card and a game changer. In less than seven days the McCain campaign has managed to not only close the gap between McCain and Obama, but to overtake the democratic nominee by 5 or 6 points. A lot of this had been credited to Palin’s attraction to Hillary supporters disaffected from the Democratic Party.
After Palin delivered her strong and somewhat provocative speech at the RNC, Obama supporters’ heads have been spinning. “Wait ‘till Hillary speaks out about Palin, she’ll show her,” they have been saying with hope that the matriarch that they betrayed will now somehow come to their rescue.
When Hillary did speak to a crowd in Kissimmee, Florida she all but completely avoided the topic of Gov. Palin except to add her name to the applause line “No way, no how, no McCain, no Palin!” Obama supporters were disappointed. Why didn’t their matriarch jump in and attack the newly rising female republican star with the same savagery she attacked Obama during the primaries? It has not happened yet, and I don’t think it will, at least not during the campaign. This has been cause for certain Republicans to suggest that even Hillary is afraid of Palin’s experience, wit and keen intellect. However, I believe there is more going on here than meets the eye.
There are a lot of things Republicans could say to characterize Sen. Clinton, most of which is none too flattering. But aside from these personal sentiments, there is one undeniable fact about the character of Sen. Hillary Rodham-Clinton; she’s smart! She’s smarter and more cunning than the average politician, she’s smarter than her husband and she is certainly smarter than Obama. Hillary has been in this game far too long to get suckered into the frenzy of attacking Gov. Palin.
Presidential campaigns don’t usually get involved in attacking the Vice Presidential nominee. VP nominees don’t usually waste much time attacking each other either; they focus on the Presidential nominee and his policies. The fact that the Obama campaign has come out so strongly on the offensive against VP nominee Palin is a real sign of their weakness and desperation as well as the genuine threat the McCain ticket represents with her on it.
The sexist smears that have been circulating the left-wing media and the internet at this stage of the game, instead of hurting Palin have seemed to cause true Feminists (as opposed to left-wing radicals) to rally around her, boosting her approval ratings in a great backlash against the Obama media. Yet Hillary stays away from targeting Palin directly.
People who pay attention realize that roughly half of Hillary’s female supporters back her simply because they want to see a woman in the oval office doing something aside from becoming closely acquainted with a presidential cigar and she seemed like the most likely candidate. It’s probably true that those women have gravitated toward the McCain campaign.
After watching so much of the Obama media and so-called feminists destroy their credibility with sexist attacks against Palin for her personal choices and life rather than her policies, Hillary knows better than to jump into this cesspool and compromise her own integrity. Hillary is not going to go down in history as the woman who attempted to destroy another qualified and successful woman’s potential bid for the White House without another woman immediately lined up to take her place. Hillary knows that women are paying attention to her. She’s also probably aware that conservative and swing voting women far outnumber her radical left-wing base.
I also don’t think that Hillary really wants Obama to win this election. I don’t think she’ll actually cast her vote for McCain. I imagine her writing herself in on the ballot this November. This was supposed to be her time, her coronation! But instead she watched her own party do to her what older professional females have had to endure under patriarchy since they entered the workforce; they passed her up for the job in favor of a younger, less experienced male applicant. She was betrayed by her own friends and colleagues in the Democratic Party as the nation saw them ignore two whole states and suspend their own Party bylaws in order to knock her out of the race and nominate a half-term male Senator. If they had nominated Hillary, there is a good chance that the Democrats could have walked away with this election. But instead, now they have a struggle on their hands.
Hillary is still smarting after this cutthroat betrayal and if she weren’t so ambitious, she would probably leave the Democratic Party and go independent. But she still wants to be President and leave a great feminist legacy for Chelsea to carry forward and so do a lot of her supporters.
If Obama were to somehow win the election, his term would be a disaster. His Marxist arrogance and inexperience would make for a presidency that would make Jimmy Carter look like Ronald Reagan. After his first term they’ll be handing the Presidency back to the Republicans on a silver platter. Regardless of how good or bad Obama’s first term could be, he will be the incumbent. Rare is the case where the incumbent does not win the party’s nomination. Either way we are looking at a minimum of eight years before Hillary could have any hope of being a legitimate presidential nominee again.
However if McCain wins, the entire narrative of this election cycle will be much different than it is today. Instead of just rattling off how “historic” the Obama nomination was, it’ll go down in history as one of the dumbest moves the Democratic Party has made in the past 100 years. The disenfranchisement of Florida and Michigan Democrats and the suspension of Party bylaws will be regarded as the first major downfall of this election cycle for the Democrats. They will lament “If only we had run Hillary!” The democrats will in effect spend the next four years priming Hillary to run against McCain-Palin or Palin-X in 2012. In that case, I have no doubt that Hillary would win the Democratic nomination.
Hillary turns 61 this year. She will continue to do the bare minimum to stump for Obama, keeping face with her party and the radical left while making sure to not lose her credibility with genuine feminists. But what do you think sounds more appetizing to an ambitious and intelligent woman like Hillary Rodham Clinton—waiting four years to run or waiting eight years when she’s 69 and likely up against a 52 year old Sarah Palin?
These I present as my personal thoughts as to why Hillary will not take on Sarah Palin directly at this time.