By John Aloysius Farrell
BERKELEY, CA. – I am on the road, and writing from one of the sturdier precincts of WantObamaLand. And I will tell you this at the start: Californians are refreshingly normal. We in DC are the weird ones.
Sure, there are lingering shreds of liberal elitism on the shores of the Bay, but not nearly as much as you might expect. The whole Sixties thing has exhausted itself.
The Culture Wars have run their course, useful only to the panhandlers of Telegraph Avenue, who still try to tap your inner hippie, and the commentators at Fox, who work to feed the fears of a certain segment of disgruntled Americans who believe the Weather Underground is just waiting for its moment to re-emerge and topple the government.
The truth is, here in Berkeley, we are all Googlers now. For the most part, people here were LIVING THEIR LIVES yesterday, and not much caring about what Chris Matthews or Sean Hannity had to say, or even who won the Pennsylvania primary.
So, on this clear morning, as refreshing breezes dispense the traces of last night’s wisps of rain, I am likely one of a very few human souls within range of my wi fi considering the tactical and strategic implications of the Pennsylvania vote. (You can take the boy out of Mordor, but you can’t take Mordor out of the boy.)
Here they are:
1) Obama is bleeding. He needs more than a couple of reviving primary wins. His whole campaign is built around the notion that this is a miracle child, some brave strange knight of Krypton, and that image is now in serious, serious jeopardy. If the Clinton campaign wasn’t so horribly mismanaged he’d be toast.
2) Obama can’t throw a punch. The Obama candidacy is the post-partisan, new-way, can’t-we-all-get-along campaign. He is committed to staying, as much as he can, above the fray. And it’s worked. One of the great unappreciated assets of the Obama campaign is its discipline. For a year now he has resisted all temptations to lower his campaign to the deplorable level of Hillary Clinton. But Americans want to know that their president can, when necessary, put an opponent on the canvass. He’s looking diffident and effete lately. He needs to sweat. We need to see the veins popping out in his neck as he calls out the hounds of hell on his foes. (Hey…I’m in Arnold land.)
3) Hillary stands for Hillary. In Pennsylvania, she confirmed that she is what her enemies have always said she is: a creature so consumed by personal ambition that she has no real principles at all.
For years, I have nursed the idea that deep inside Hillary, beneath a scarred and protective shell, was a person who stood for something, and cared about something more than Hillary. Then she dropped to her knees, in genuflection, before that gibbering right wing nut job, Richard Mellon Scaife.
For those of you who don’t recall, it was his millions that funded the Right Wing Conspiracy that humiliated her by exposing the tawdry inner workings of her marriage; threatened to break up her family; forever tarnished her husband’s presidency; set the Democratic Party back for a decade and portrayed her as a harpy who either 1) had a closet affair with Vince Foster that prompted him to commit suicide or 2) was a secret lesbian or 3) both of the above.
Boy was I wrong. In crawling to Scaife, the publisher of a rag in Pittsburgh, she showed that she’s as craven as her enemies have always said she is.
Superdelegates who think that Hillary’s 50 percent negative rating can be finessed with a few appearances on Saturday Night Live in the fall should think again. Character is destiny.
