Pam is dead-on about why Hillary Clinton has been tanking. Some choice quotes:
Our country’s issues with gender bias places everything Clinton does under a microscope…. However, I would argue that gender may play less of a role in this race because of the broad demographic voting patterns we are seeing here. I think the problem is that the woman is Hillary Clinton — it’s quite possible that a woman could have faired better in this race, just not this one.
The problem isn’t the policy positions, I think the main dismay among the Clintonistas is that the voters are responding to something Obama has — charisma and a message that connects — that she cannot match, and that they don’t know how to successfully counter that.
Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to wag your finger at the American public and tell them not to be fooled, or that they are stupid for thinking with their hearts, not their heads. That doesn’t garner more votes, in fact it can cause blowback.
Hillary is now trying to win the nomination by brute force, with the help of idiots like Mark Penn. While Obama’s campaign entices and inspires, her campaign tries to tell people how stupid they are for wanting to vote for him. It makes her seem tone-deaf when it comes to people skills. Is this how she’d run her presidency?
If she manages to bounce back and become the nominee (it’s possible; there’s a debate tomorrow night and another one next week, and debates have a way of turning things around, and Obama has been diffident during debates), I’ll fully support her. She’s a Democrat with Democratic policy ideas and she’d be lots better than McCain. And I still want to like her. I don’t like not liking her.
But she’s not making it easy.
I’m not worried about John McCain at the moment. What concerns me is the behaviour of Hillary Clinton. Now she knows she lost, she will try and torpedo Obama’s bid, so she can get in 2012. She is well capable of this and I expect it fully.
Obama is a lot shrewder than you think he is. Look at how he baited Bill Clinton in SC. It worked a treat.
He will do fine.
I don’t think Obama has brought out the big guns yet; he’s gone this far being positive and simply responding to her attacks without turning them back on her. Yes, he makes vague references to the mixed blessing that was the 1990s, but there’s a lot of low blows he could land that he hasn’t, and he won’t. I think if it starts to appear that Hillary is surging, he’s just going to nail her on the war. I think that’s what he’s been waiting for. He hasn’t wanted to go negative, because he wants a different kind of politics, and I think he honestly does respect Hillary Clinton. But the war is her Achilles heel. The argument that if she’d known then what she knows now she would have voted differently doesn’t hold water; a president who is “ready on day one” needs to have been the kind of person who knew they couldn’t trust Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld; the kind of person savvy enough about Middle East politics to know that there was no possible way Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were in league together; rational enough to know better than to support the “vast right wing conspiracy” (her own phrase!) in their ridiculously impatient quest to invade a country that had not nor could not threaten us; compassionate enough to care about the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and the thousands of American lives about to be spent on a foolish experiment in democracy; careful enough to insist that diplomacy be given a full chance and that the inspectors be allowed to do their jobs. Of course the lion’s share of the blame goes squarely to Bush, but if Hillary expects us to believe that she voted to grant him the authority to invade Iraq as a purely diplomatic move, than she is too naive for this job. As Barack has said, he doesn’t want to just end the war, he wants to end the mindset that got us there. That’s why he’s going to win. All other issues are secondary. America wants a president who was right about Iraq from the get-go, not someone 7 years down the road trying to pretend she didn’t really support what she openly advocated.
That’s dead on. She’s not making it easy. She better win Texas and Ohio or exit the stage.