Talk about being out of touch: "Pennsylvania did the job of calming any nerves that existed. It showed that the big states around the country think she's the best person to be president."
Those whistling-through-the-graveyard words were crooned by Clinton campaign spokesman Jay Carson, who, at the time, must have been either drunk or off his medication. Pennsylvania calmed nerves? -- rather than shattering the almost partywide hope that finally, at long last, a stake would be driven through the merciless heart of the Campaign That Wouldn't Die?
The quote did perform a public service, however, in that it showed just how colossally egocentric the Clinton campaign is. Here we have a preconvention situation in which supporters of the last two candidates standing -- one, barely -- are going at each other with a verbal brutality unequaled since 1968, and all Mr. Carson experiences is relief. Next, his candidate will be assuring us that it's not all about her.
Yet the Washington Post pointedly differed with Mr. Carson in its coverage of Pennsylvania's aftermath: "The protracted and increasingly acrimonious fight for the Democratic presidential nomination is unnerving core constituencies -- African Americans and wealthy liberals -- who are becoming convinced that the party could suffer irreversible harm if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton maintains her sharp line of attack against Sen. Barack Obama."
You will note not only the obvious -- that, objectively speaking, the situation is broadly seen as "unnerving," despite Carson's characterization -- but the Post's subsequent, more subtle wording about cause and effect. According to the Post, these "core constituencies" aren't emotionally unraveling because of any perceived threat to their candidate's eventual nomination, but merely because of the opposing candidate's "sharp line of attack."
In other words, Sen. Clinton's nomination is now seen by even the mainstream press as irretrievably doomed. It's her present attacks, and not any down-the-road threat to Obama's nomination, that unnerve, and the situation is now being reporting as such with all due objectivity. It's a subtle journalistic shift, but a shift nonetheless.
Far less subtle, however, is what these core constituencies are now projecting openly; and what they're projecting is nothing less than a virtual race war within the Democratic Party, which the press -- until it catches up to this reality, as it finally did with the nomination battle -- prefers to call a "rift":
"[Majority Whip James] Clyburn accused Clinton and her husband yesterday of marginalizing black voters and opening a rift between her campaign and [the] African American Democratic base.... Some surrogates in her camp are trying to render Obama unelectable against the Republican nominee so she could run for the Democratic nomination in 2012, he suggested."
One can easily, and perhaps more precisely, substitute "ghettoizing" for "marginalizing" and "blue-collar males and older white women" for "her campaign" and, presto, suddenly read the writing on the wall -- a simmering ethnocultural war that will, in time, boil over into clearly defined, unpatchable factional ruptures within the party.
Clyburn's "suggestion" is finding prominent and outspoken allies, such as Rep. William Clay, who further suggested to the senator from New York: "If you have any, any kind of loyalty to the Democratic Party, perhaps you need to rethink your strategy and bow out gracefully in order to save this party from a disastrous end in November."
For now, Clay's projection extends no farther than November. He's restraining himself.
Clyburn, on the other hand, is already pondering the underhanded ramifications for 2012.
But give this matter another couple of months and the same or equally prominent Democratic voices will be talking openly not merely of a problematic 2008, or Clinton's designs on 2012, but of the ultimate unraveling of the party itself.
For the Democratic Party to endure nationally as the oldest political party in the world, which it quite literally is, it requires the allegiance of both Clinton's camp and Obama's. If the latter is deprived of that former allegiance in 2008, then Clinton can forget about 2012, because there's a rather good chance that the party will have long since and permanently divided.
For the Clintons, characteristically, that's a problem to worry about tomorrow, since they care only about today. But for rank-and-file Democrats who care about tomorrow, it's a problem to worry about now.
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