Interesting piece from the Economist on the 2008 contest. It begins with a discussion of Hillary's last-minute decision to attend this weekend's events in Selma, and then moves on to discuss the importance of inevitability in primary campaigns. An excerpt:
As George Bush demonstrated in 2000, there are few more important advantages in the primary race than a sense of “inevitability”. If you are the inevitable candidate, operatives clamour to be on your team, fund-raisers stuff your coffers with gold and waverers swallow their doubts. Lose that aura, and it all goes into reverse.
The Clinton campaign worked hard to follow the Bush model. Hard-knuckled Clinton operatives are still trying to prevent people from wavering or hedging their bets by hinting that “You are either with us or against us.” But these threats are growing hollow. John McCain has already lost his sense of inevitability on the Republican side; now the same thing seems to be happening to Mrs Clinton.Which is all the fault of one man: Mr Obama. He either trumps or neutralises Mrs Clinton's biggest selling-points. She is potentially America's first female president; he is potentially its first black president. She is a celebrity: he has star power. Mrs Clinton had hoped to set the pace of the campaign. But he has repeatedly run ahead of her—getting into the race before her, for example, and making her announcement, when it came, look like an exercise in catch-up.
Now Mr Obama is making inroads into a political base that the Clinton dynasty has spent more than a decade cultivating. And he poses a threat on other fronts: Mrs Clinton has always had problems with anti-war leftists, who are furious about her vote to authorise the Iraq war and disappointed that she has refused to renounce it. Mr Obama, by contrast, has an impeccable anti-war record.
The news of Mr Obama's strides among blacks comes a week after a successful fund-raiser in Hollywood. The event netted $1.3m and attracted the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Morgan Freeman and Ben Stiller. George Clooney grandly informed Newsweek that Mr Obama is “as good as Bobby late in his career and Jack from early on”; Halle Berry said she would pick up litter in the streets to clear his path. What was all the more galling to the Clinton camp was that the fund-raiser was arranged by a “Friend of Bill”, David Geffen, who raised some $18m for Mr Clinton in the 1990s.
Most worrying of all for the Clintonistas is the fact that Mr Obama's rising fortunes are encouraging the Democrats to ask some tough questions about Mrs Clinton's biography, questions that the Clinton camp had hoped to suppress by a combination of muscle and momentum. Mr Geffen opened this Pandora's box by moaning about the “Clinton royal family” and her polarising qualities—and since then everybody has been at it.
All of this is important, but I've long thought that the last argument about a "royal family" is the things that's most likely to doom Hillary. Imagine, for a moment, a world where Hillary wins the nomination. Here's what modern US presidential history would look like
1988: Bush
1992: Clinton
1996: Clinton
2000: Bush
2004: Bush
2008: Clinton (?)
By 2012 it will have been 24 years with either a Clinton or Bush in the White House. Should she win another term that number would jump to 28 years. And if you include the 8 years during which Bush served as VP you end up with nearly four decades of Bush and Clinton. Even if I could have Bill instead of Hillary I'd have to pass on that.
Change is going to be the theme of the 2008 campaign. If your name is either Bush or Clinton, you can't be the candidate of change. It won't work. It just won't work.
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