Posted by
T. Thomas on Saturday, February 16, 2008 1:05:24 PM
Mr. Obama should never cease watching his back. Though the press is quick to declare him the frontrunner and to instill him with inevitability, it was only a few weeks back that Mrs. Clinton was so imbued.
He has attracted a huge following of the young and dewy-eyed. So fresh and untried are they their every thought and utterance seems surrounded by quotation marks. Their phrases, their ideology and their hopeless naiveté speak of the academy and not of the streets. They have no idea just how ugly Democratic street politics can get.
So while their candidate continues to enthrall them with wonderful, youthful and meaningless words – words like “hope” and “change,” so easily displayed on giant LCD screens and stenciled onto glossy blue signs – Mr. Obama’s acolytes had best bone up on some additional vocabulary: words like “machine,” “brokered convention, “floor fight,” and “credential battles.”
They need to quickly grasp that great liberal platitudes like “Let Every Vote Count” will be turned into a short stabbing weapon when Mrs. Clinton’s thugs come to the floor insisting that Michigan and Florida be seated and counted. They need to comprehend the long history of Democratic machine politics with its great tools of patronage, bribery and blackmail. There is not a “superdelegate” whose skeletons are unknown to Mrs. Clinton, or whose need for money, power, patronage or downright legal cover is not clearly articulated in detail in her files. This is not a woman who will be stopped by the mere will of the Democratic base – she will rule, or scorch the earth trying.
Look at the audience at a Hillary event. Watch when the camera pans the crowd to see the living definition of the word “grim.” Her supporters do not love her because she is Hillary, they cling to her because she is Woman and this is their final and best chance to matter on the planet Earth. Their aging angry visages lined with decades of battles with men, dour in countenance and furious at being challenged by a competing Democratic constituency at the very moment of triumph, these harpies are not about to yield to callow youth brimming with enthusiasm for a political rock star of little substance. These women and their leader have an agenda, and this creaky antique Feminism will not be denied by some vapid American Idol like Barack Obama. These are the post-menstrual mothers of the nation, half Cindy Sheehan and half Mother Jones, and they will happily drown their children in blood before they will give in to their naïve vanities.
Obama and his supporters take comfort from the fawning pronouncements of circus performers like Chris Matthews and Charlie Gibson at their peril. There is NOTHING inevitable about Obama and there will not be until the head is cut off the Gorgon and buried - a task not easily accomplished as Perseus learned. I wonder if Obama understands the peril he is in – it is clear his young devotees do not: they are given to singing too loudly, dancing too happily and foolishly thinking their own rapture infectious and not just annoying to those who have to listen to it.