LP’s Indiana correspondent, QUT academic Terry Flew writes:
Bloomington, Indiana is where I am at the moment, at the University of Indiana. It is best known as the home of Albert Kinsey, John Cougar Mellencamp, and the ‘Hoosiers’, a basketball team about whom a film was made in 1986 starring Gene Hackman as a coach and Dennis Hopper as a drunk.
Indiana is one of the two states voting tomorrow (Tuesday May 5) in the protracted and increasingly acrimonious Democratic Party primaries. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have worked these two states hard, even though they both typically vote Republican, as the long march to the Democrat nomination continues.
The striking feature at present is just how far to the right Hilary Clinton has turned in the course of this campaign. Having struggled against Obama for most core Democrat constituencies, she has over the last month increasingly pitched her campaign at what are known here as the ‘Reagan Democrats’ - white voters, often older or less educated, anxious about change, deeply patriotic, and suspicious of liberal reformers.
Given that the Clinton years in the White house were viewed by most outside of the U.S. as at least notionally progressive, and that Hillary Clinton was for so long the bete noire of American conservatives, this has come as a bit of a surprise, at least to me. She appeared on the FOX News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor last week, her defence of religion and guns, and her threats to get tough on China and to ‘obliterate’ Iran if Israel is attacked seem to be straight out of the Republican campaign book. And the favour seems to have been returned. She is getting endorsements from FOX News, The Weekly Standard and Rush Limbaugh.
This turn to the right came with the claim that Obama is a liberal ‘elitist’. Given the respective upbringings of Hilary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the Clinton White House years, and events such as Bill Clinton’s 60th birthday party, where people paid $60,000+ to hang out with Bill and friends for three days and hear the Rolling Stones, this seems odd to put it mildly.
Predictions are that Barack Obama will win North Carolina and Hillary Clinton will win Indiana. If this turns out to be the case, the saga continues, and the caravans move to Kentucky, West Virginia and Oregon. The big winners out of this are, of course, the 24 hour cable news channels and, to a lesser extent, the Republican Party.
Two things strike me as weird about this. The first is that Hillary Clinton can’t win the Democratic Party nomination. Or at least she can’t unless the party superdelegates* overturn the popular vote and anoint Hillary to the candidacy based on concerns about Obama’s ‘electability’*. If that happens, the Democratic Party will split in two at the Denver convention.
The second thing is whether the Democrats are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. George W. Bush’s personal approval rating is 28%, lower than that of Jimmy Carter during the American hostage capture in Iran. With so many other things running for them in this campaign, can the Democrats - who have lost seven of the last ten U.S. presidential elections - actually find a way to lose this one?
What is for sure is that when Hillary Clinton downed a whisky with a beer chaser in Pennsylvania, it seems to have washed away many of the progressive, small-l liberal credentials that both her friends and foes used to attribute to her.
* On The Daily Show, Jo Stewart asked Howard Dean, the Democratic National Committee Chair, if superdelegates ‘had been bitten by radioactive spiders and has powers 10,000 times those of normal voters’. On superdelegates and electability see:
chilling his balls in a bowl of your tears
Now thats the line of the day
Rush Limbaugh is endorsing Hillary because he thinks that she would be easier for McCain to beat than Obama would be, not because he likes her politics, if I understand correctly.
Hillary is getting scarier than Bundi Irwin.
Seriously, though, when a Democrat hopeful starts to get endorsements from the neocons isn’t it time to start to worry. It means both political parties in the Us have gone mad.
Hard to say, Tom, as I can’t say that I listen to his show.
I think the three key things are:
1. All political commentators are loving this show, as it is much better for their ratings than would be the case if there was already a Democrat candidate;
2. Hillary Clinton and her supporters are now much keener to go on their shows, as with O’Reilly last week, whereas last year there was a quasi-boycott of Fox by the Democrats;
3. Hillary’s strategy at this time is to support the things that most conservative commentators support (guns, patriotism, China-bashing, nuking Iran etc.), and she seems to be pushing herself at present as the ‘white candidate’.
At this point in time, it would be hard to know what Hillary Clinton’s policies are. I am sure they are on her Web site, but it is largely sound bites at this point in time.
We should keep in mind that in the US, “liberal” means “left wing” so it makes sense liberals like Hillary should look after working class interests. In Australia and the UK “liberal” means more keeping the government out of people’s economic and private lives.
Clinton and her team must have a low opinion of American voters, if they believe all this right-pandering and whisky-downing and reinventing is going to work. Whether this opinion is based in reality is another matter. Did Howard win many votes dressed up in a Socceroos tracksuit? Unlikely.
Blessed be to the goddess that the Oklahoma primary is been and gone. At this point, I imagine Hillary’s desperation would take the form of belting out off-key Rodgers And Hammerstein numbers in muslin.
Terry, nice post. Out of curiosity, is the position of LP Indiana correspondent well remunerated?
What I can’t understand is how the Clinton campaign thinks it will contest the presidential campaign if she did gain the nomination courtesy of the super-delegates.
Hasn’t she now exhausted her campaign coffers? Would she have enough volunteers, given that most of the young, enthusiastic types are said to be Obama supporters?
And how would she respond to McCain’s inevitable charge that the “Democratic” party is anything but, given how the party machine flagrantly ignored the express wishes of a majority of primary voters. You can bet that would be his #1 talking point.
um, it’s “Bindi” I think. But, yes, she is…
Indiana LP correspondent pays you all the cable you want.
The longer term game plan for Hillary (and Bill - he is certainly around), I don’t know.
I’m getting Jon Stewart’s Daily Show now, and he was wondering how a Yale-educated, obviously intelligent person ended up campaigning on the back of pick-up trucks and shouting “y’all” at the NASCAR Museum.
With Kentucky coming up next, I’m looking forward to seeing Hillary whipping up the ‘lunch bucket crowd’ from the back of a horse.
Its a strange transformation going on here.
Limbaugh on Hillary
me@3, zardoz @ 7. Yeah. Typo.Still scary.Next Liberal PM, I reckon. Oh, I don’t mean to be a troll. I just can’t help myself when it comes to Bindi Irwin.
Liberals in the US during the 90s generally considered Bill Clinton to be a pretty good old-fashioned Republican president but not a particularly spectacular Democratic one — and I believe Hillary Clinton’s voting record as a senator has been fairly conservative too.
I’d always thought their primary distinguishing feature from the mainstream of US Republicanism was that they didn’t loathe black people. The race-baiting on the current campaign has make me reconsider that.
Since Obama has consolidated his hold on the left end of the spectrum Hillary can only go to the right in search of allies, her personal views are irrelevant, it is a matter of political logic, a bit like NOLS and LA in early 1990s student politics.
Great piece, Terry. Hope you do a wrap after NC and Ia.
“What is for sure is that when Hillary Clinton downed a whisky with a beer chaser in Pennsylvania, it seems to have washed away many of the progressive, small-l liberal credentials that both her friends and foes used to attribute to her.”
Like going back to a juice bottle bong after sucking on boutique spliffs all one’s life. A definitive moment indeed.
Yep, keep em comin, Terry!
Paris vaut bien une messe.
Hillary alert.
In what The Economist describes as ‘a rare moment of enthusiasm for the institutions governing the global trading system’ Linked text, Hillary Clinton has proposed to Indiana voters that she will use the powers of the World Trade Organisation to break up the OPEC cartel.
The Economist is skeptical (surprise!). Are there any international law expert who know the plausibility of the US President seeking a mandate from Congress to do this?
That was a matter of political immaturity and historical amnesia, IMHO. I say that as a participant in one of the non-Labor left factions who tried in vain to point out that the non-Labor left had never had a majority at any democratically constituted national student union annual conference in Australian history, and that political logic actually dictated that the broad left would achieve more by getting over this petty obsession with whether or not people had a bit of maroon and white plastic in their pocket.
Having said that, the comparison with Hillary and the US Democrats may not be totally inapt.