Damsel of Distress [Peggy Noonan]

The Wall Street Journal ^ | May 9, 2008 | Peggy Noonan

[Aristotelian]

This is an amazing story. The Democratic Party has a winner. It has a nominee. You know this because he has the most votes and the most elected delegates, and there's no way, mathematically, his opponent can get past him. Even after the worst two weeks of his campaign, he blew past her by 14 in North Carolina and came within two in Indiana.

Martin Kozlowski He's got this thing. And the Democratic Party, after this long and brutal slog, should be dancing in the streets. Party elders should be coming out on the balcony in full array, in full regalia, and telling the crowd, "Habemus nominatum": "We have a nominee." And the crowd below should be cheering, "Viva Obamus! Viva nominatum!"

Instead, you know where they are, the party elders. They are in a Democratic club on Capitol Hill, slump-shouldered at the bar, having a drink and then two, in a state of what might be called depressed horror. "What are they doing to the party?" they wail. "Why are they doing this?"

You know who they are talking about.

The Democratic Party can't celebrate the triumph of Barack Obama because the Democratic Party is busy having a breakdown. You could call it a breakdown over the issues of race and gender, but its real source is simply Hillary Clinton. Whose entire campaign at this point is about exploiting race and gender.

Here's the first place an outsider could see the tensions that have taken hold: on CNN Tuesday night, in the famous Brazile-Begala smackdown. Paul Begala wore the smile of the 1990s, the one in which there is no connection between the shape of the mouth and what the mouth says. All is mask. Donna Brazile was having none of it.

[Aristotelian]

FINI

[SatinDoll]

IT AIN’T OVER UNTIL THE BALLOON DROP AT THE CONVENTION IN DENVER, COLORADO.

[KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle]

The Democratic Party has a winner. It has a nominee. You know this because he has the most votes and the most elected delegates, and there's no way, mathematically, his opponent can get past him.

To hear some of the die hard oh-eek-it's-H!I!L!L!A!R!Y! types around here tell it, however: Hillary Clinton doesn't need mere votes; Hillary Clinton doesn't need delegates (elected or otherwise); Hillary Clinton is more powerful than mathematics, or the laws of gravity, or... or... well, just OR, is all, dammit! ;)

[Bernard]

There's no clear winner in the Democrat nomination because neither one of them is qualified to be President. And the complete lack of leadership in the party lets this go on, because it would require hard decisions and statesmanship to resolve.

A party made up of unrelated special interest groups can't be expected to get along all the time. It must be difficult to nominate and vote for empty suits and empty chairs all the time.

[Post Toasties]

Whatever it takes to keep them going at each other as long as possible is what’s important.

[Coldwater Creek]

I have been watching the Clinton's political going's on for almost 30 years. They NEVER quit!

[Coldwater Creek]

We could say the same about McCain!

[Nathan Zachary]

Yep. they MUST be kept fighting to the absolute last day. Keep them both talking and burying themselves in their own B.S.

[JLS]

It aint over until convention fights.

BTW, I think Clinton could be correct in the number required to get a majority of the delegates is 2209 or 2210 not 2025. Whether they are all seated or not the Dims have 4418 delegates this year. If the party rules require a majority vote of the delegates, then that well could require a majority of delegatea apportioned to the states. Then maybe we could have ballot after ballot with neither getting to 2210?

[FFranco]

Let us hope this leads to the break up of the Democrat Party with all those special interest groups splitting off into new coalitions.

Once that happens, there will be one party Republican Rule for a while until that party, too, splits. The next 50 years could be interesting.

[mrsmel]

What's really funny are all the 'rats now saying "I knew it all along, I knew the Clintons were opportunistic cynical power-hungry self-centered frauds", but they wouldn't hear it when Republicans tried to tell them. But oh, now they claim they always knew it, LOL. The hypocrisy of 'rats, and the way they have no shame about it, knows no limits.

[mrsmel]

The difference is, a majority of conservatives have never tried to front for McCain all along, the way the ‘rats did for the Clintons while it served their purposes.

[JoeSixPack1]

I’ll bet no one knew Hitlery was a body double for Helen Thomas’s Newsweek photo shoot! Masterful imagery, creative shadowing.

Allows you to appreciate why pin-ups are being banned on military bases.

[Jess Kitting]

Hillary Clinton doesn't need mere votes; Hillary Clinton doesn't need delegates (elected or otherwise); Hillary Clinton is more powerful than mathematics, or the laws of gravity

Who needs those things when you can cheat and get away with it?

That has been the Clintons' modus operandi since the beginning. ('cept now they aren't getting away with it as they once did.)

The Clintons are not done yet. They can and will try to maneouver the Florida and Michigan delegations to put numbers on their side.

Lie, cheat, threaten, steal!
You can do it, yes you will.
To the White House, Hill and Bill!

I don't trust them. The Clintons still have tricks up their sleeves, even though the media is no longer in their back pocket.

It ain't over till it's over.

[KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle]

('cept now they aren't getting away with it as they once did.)

My point. ;)

[fishhound]

Simone de Beauvoir, existentialist and feminist writer and also girlfriend of Jean Paul Satre...

Wrote “The Second Sex”. In it she said that women and black men were on an equal footing and that they should work together to advance each others position out of thier equally supressed positions. Supressed by men that is.
This was a very popular lefty and feminist tome.

Well... I guess they couldn’t work it out. lol

She must be rolling over in her grave.

[advance_copy]

It's not math anymore, it's psychodrama. If she can't have it, no one can have it. If she has to tear the party apart, she will.

As if everyone in the world didn't see that coming. Rule or ruin -- it's the Clinton way. Pretty daggone entertaining right now, though. This has been the most fun week in politics since Dan Ra^ther got busted in '04.

[nathanbedford]

Peggy Noonan's column is profoundly flawed.

Racism is not a one-way street and candor about racism equally cannot be a one-way street.

If 95% of African-Americans can vote for an African-American without criticism, whites are entitled to vote their own racial interests. If one is entitled to vote his racial interests, others are certainly entitled to comment upon it without the very act of political commentary itself being libeled as racism.

We cannot live in a just society if the rules of that society are that only white racism counts. We cannot live in a just society under the iron fist of hypocrisy.

Dare we utter the unspeakable? Barak Obama would not be the putative nominee of the Democratic Party for the presidency of the United States of America apart from only one reason: he is African American.

There, I have said it. Why cannot Hillary Clinton say it?

Peggy, get out of those Manhattan solons, you seem to go off course in about one out of five of your columns after some soirée or another. Rather than your paranoia about protecting children from the television image of the Clintons, you ought to have a care about the company you keep.

[garylmoore]

I will be really glad to see her ugly face gone from the news and everywhere else.

[Randy Papadoo]

Peggy, don’t you know that there are plenty of voters who are enjoying watching the slugfest between Clinton and NO!bama? Besides, I’ve still got half my ice cream cone left!

[browardchad]

Very well said.

One of the most disturbing elements of this campaign is that the visceral dislike of the Clintons has served to mask the even more troublesome background, associations and ideology of Obama. He has used his race as both a shield and a sword, and too many have been too eager to rush to a public microphone to proclaim their colorblind virtuosity, which, in truth, has more to do with politically-correct blindness than with conviction.

[anton]

The Obamas are garden variety racists blacks preaching victimology and racial recrimination. Obama doesn’t say so very loud because he thinks that if you’re gonna get anywhere black, you have to smile at white people and don’t make any fast moves.

Clinton know this better than all of us together. She has spent her life working the Obamas of the world.

[ThreePuttinDude]

I just don't understand why the (R)’s aren't screaming
* “How this is a perfect example of (D) leadership”
* “Look what the (D)’s can do if they don't even try”
* “WOW, look how they want to change rules, just like in 2000”

You all get the idea. Why can't their actions be the war cry of the Good Guy's?
Dang, our guys need to get some stones for a change....8^/

[nathanbedford]

I agree with your post entirely. In the context of trying to identify the appeal of Obama I published this post:

Yes Obama is an empty suit but he is actually more than that, he is a candidate who is African American and this racial reality entirely disguises the fact that the suit is empty. In fact, it was always better for Obama's campaign for the suit to be empty.

The American left, indeed the international left, is a hodgepodge of mutually inconsistent plans and programs which history has demonstrated cannot work. Leftists persist in their leftism because they believe that they are smarter than everybody else. Which really means," I am smarter than all the leftists who've come before and failed with this idea." The glue which holds leftism together when it should splinter apart because of its mutually inconsistent precepts, because it has shopped the entire country to ravening special-interest groups, is their idea that Republicans/conservatives are racists and they are not.

As long as we are racists and they are not, the left need not face up to its own looniness. This is why the left reacts so vehemently to politically incorrect racist remarks. This is why the left goes so far as to force employees to undergo reeducation camps so that their anti-racism can be justified. This is why Imus was forced off the air and why even posters on this forum object to my avatar. The coin of this political race card is white guilt.

Now comes Obama. As one black writer has pointed out, he has made a tacit deal with white liberal America: you support me blindly and I will in turn refrain from rubbing America's nose in its history of slavery and segregation. You can expiate your white guilt by voting for me. But Obama has to hold up his end of the deal, he must not rub our noses in our sins like Jesse Jackson or Reverend Al. As long as he was seen to be an empty suit-offering no reproach to America-we were comfortable with him.

Now comes The Right Reverend Wright. He has broken the deal. This is why Obama had to disown him. Wright rubs our noses in racism. To a conservative his crazy allegations are so bizarre that it makes not much sense and doesn't change the equation. We don't buy into this AIDS in Africa business, for example. But for a liberal, Reverend Wright's allegations are not bizarre but actually within the realm of intellectual respectability. We can dismiss them, but the left cannot because much of it comes right out of their own catechism.

What about the great mass in the middle? The moderates, the undecideds, the people who don't follow politics until after Labor Day, the folks who permit the likes of Barbara Walters or Oprah Winfrey to persuade them, what about them, the people who actually decide our elections? These decent folks don't want to be racists. They are always looking for a savior because they will tell you, "I always vote for the man." They shrink from the very idea of voting based on ideology. So an empty suit is no problem for them as long as he is also a savior. Obama was a savior. More, he was an empty vessel into which we could pour all of our yearnings and our simplistic hopes about the political process.

Now this illusion has been shattered by the right Reverend Wright and it remains to be seen whether the mainstream media can put Humpty Dumpty's pieces back together again.

[lexusppd]

You are correct and it is all because of unthinking unreasonable fear. Because the media has, in the past portrayed the Clinton's as magical and omnipotent many have swallowed the hook line and sinker.

To those paying attention it should have been obvious Clinton was finished the moment she blew the question on drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. Can she still "steal" the nomination? Maybe but it won't matter because neither of them has a prayer in the general. Not because McCain is so strong but because they are so terribly flawed.

[seppel]

“Whose entire campaign at this point is about exploiting race and gender.”

Obama’s entire reason for existence is the exploitation of race. And dumb white America is being exploited by him in the hope of being called good persons.

[carton253]

Very well put!

[carton253]

At the risk of being redundant, very well put, again.

[lexusppd]

"If 95% of African-Americans can vote for an African-American without criticism, whites are entitled to vote their own racial interests. If one is entitled to vote his racial interests, others are certainly entitled to comment upon it without the very act of political commentary itself being libeled as racism."

Ah, but the all knowing libs say blacks cannot be racist because they have no power. See, if you don't have POWER then what is otherwise called racist behavior is merely defending ones self against the racism of the powerful.

[mo]

“In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, “found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”......”

This, this here, ladies and gents, is where Operation Chaos starts to pay out ...big time!!!

[ishabibble]

>>But Obama has to hold up his end of the deal, he must not rub our noses in our sins like Jesse Jackson or Reverend Al. As long as he was seen to be an empty suit-offering no reproach to America-we were comfortable with him.<<

That's Michelle Obama’s job, she is the quiescently angry black woman. Not just scary, downright unhinged.

[BibChr]

If I were a brilliant pundit, I’d write a column about how the Dems are getting exactly what they deserve.

They sold their soul, as a party, to keep narcissist Bill Clinton’s pasty white hinder in office. Now his narcissist wife is arguably destroying their party.

Surprise!

Not.

[Hacklehead]

“Dare we utter the unspeakable? Barak Obama would not be the putative nominee of the Democratic Party for the presidency of the United States of America apart from only one reason: he is African American.”

I disagree. The main reason Obama has so much support is not because he is black, but because he is not Hellary. I think that deep down, RAT Party members realize that Hellary is ethically, morally and tempermentally UNFIT to be President. They also remember the trainwreck of the KKKlintons in the WhiteHouse and do not want a repeat. The KKKlintons are only about themselves and did enormous damage to the party in the 90’s including emptying DNC coffers for their own campaign leaving little for others. Furthermore, Hellary is VERY unlikeable and has stepped on many RAT toes over the years. Sure there were other Hellary alternatives they could have chosen, but all were political snoozers. Obama gives the impression of being a great politician and can give an inspiring speech. They chose celebrity over substance.

[SE Mom]

Well- we all know what happened when Geraldine Ferraro dared to say what you did- Hillary is coming as close as she dares to saying the same.

[LZ_Bayonet]

"Whatever it takes to keep them going at each other as long as possible is what’s important."

Rush? Is that you?

I know Rush - "OPERATION CHAOS!" - I hear you.

[the invisib1e hand]

should should should.

An endless fight is a media windfall. Like they're gonna let that windfall go? Further, the left doesn't know how not to be destructive to order. It's as much a part of the ideology as breathing is to mere mortals.

[randita]

It's not math anymore, it's psychodrama. If she can't have it, no one can have it. If she has to tear the party apart, she will.

Well said, Peggy.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

A good theory, to which I subscribe on a cheerful day. Anybody could have beaten Hillary, she’s so bad; and by chance a truly absurd example came along. Behold, even Barack Obama could beat Hillary Clinton.
One might even say that much of his charisma was simply the force of the masses fleeing her repulsive person. Before, he was merely charming, articulate, as Biden noted; after getting into a race with Clinton, Obama became a demigod.

[PapaBear3625]

Ah, but the all knowing libs say blacks cannot be racist because they have no power. See, if you don't have POWER then what is otherwise called racist behavior is merely defending ones self against the racism of the powerful.

A time is coming, when people stop caring if they are considered racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever, by the Left. I'm there. I don't care any more. I am what I am

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Clinton:

Sen. Obama's support among working,

or to be more specific

hard-working Americans,

still don't get it? all righty

WHITE Americans, is weakening again

and you KNOW what I'm talkin' about!

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Noonan: The question "Who will tell her, who can make her go?" is really the question "Who will save the Democratic Party in 2008?"

ALGORE. ALGORE WILL SAVE US. Algoralgoralgoralgoralgorrrrrrrrrrrrr

[Hacklehead]

“In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, “found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

There are 2 ways to look at this comment. The first is “I have the ignorant white racist vote!” The second is that Whites are abandoning Obama big time. If you look at the county returns in IN, Hellary won all but a few counties and she lead beat Obama by 20-30 points in many white counties.

[Drawsing]

So you are saying there is an elephant in the room. And the elephant has been there for so long that there is an awful mess on the floor. And the elephant can hardly turn around because of all the naked emperors getting in the way and stepping on the poop.

[Ann Archy]

The Clintons will NEVER let a Black Guy BEAT THEM....NEVER!! Lookout Barack.

[Ann Archy]

Funny that almost ALL of the Clinton hacks are supporting Obama!!

[.cnI redruM]

I love this! The Dems have played the race card covertly for some many elections, they are totally unprepared to deal with someone who does it openly.

Hillary has a new slogan. “Everything’s Gonna’ be All White!”

[Ann Archy]

I don't blame blacks for voting for Barack.....they want equality for their colour.....ALL blacks who have felt un-equal should vote for Obama....sorry.

All women who have cried about being un-equal should vote for Hillary.....I feel sorry for BLACK WOMEN...."WHO TO CHOOSE"???? What a dilema!!

[lexusppd]

"A time is coming, when people stop caring if they are considered racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever, by the Left. I'm there. I don't care any more. I am what I am"

I agree and I am also there and have been most of my life. As they always do the loony left will over reach and a rebellion will ensue erasing what gains they made previously. This will happen as soon as people are directly effected by the results of their acquiescence to political correctness.

[Stentor]

Party elders should be coming out on the balcony in full array, in full regalia, and telling the crowd, "Habemus nominatum": "We have a nominee." And the crowd below should be cheering, "Viva Obamus! Viva nominatum!"

Peggy, Peggy, Peggy. The party elders would call that garlic nose talk.

[mrsmel]

The hypocrisy and the double standards, and the way those on the left arbitrarily set up rules for everyone else that they don’t deign to follow when it’s against their interests, is what burns me up the most. Also, the way those in Republican leadership keep playing the game and letting them get away with it, instead of calling their bluff and once and for all defusing cynical accusations of racism.