A year ago, Hillary Clinton’s path to the Democratic Presidential Nomination, even to the Presidency itself, seem clear and she seemed unstoppable.
Once people actually started voting though, things fell apart. She lost Iowa, came back in New Hampshire, and then got creamed in South Carolina. Along the way, she picked up meaningless victories in Michigan and Florida, but, by Super Tuesday and then the Potomac Primary a week later, the momentum had clearly shifted and Barack Obama was on track for what looks to be an eventual victory at the convention.
So, what went wrong ?
Dick Polman suggests that Americans figured out that they were simply sick of the Clinton family:
The inescapable truth is that a huge Democratic constituency was hungering for an alternative to the Clintons. I heard this repeatedly, as far back as 2002. While interviewing Washington-based Democrats, I was struck by how often they would trash the party’s golden duo. (I knew it was coming when they would preface their remarks by asking, “Can I go off the record for a moment?”) As one prominent party woman - this is someone who appears regularly on national TV, in a neutral mode - remarked to me in 2003, “We need to put the Clintons in a cage somewhere, with a blanket thrown over it.”
The point is, millions of Democrats were poised to support a strong not-Hillary candidate. Obama filled the bill, and the Clintons, convinced of their entitlement, were way too slow in taking him seriously - and in recognizing that his early support was, in some important ways, a referendum on them.
And it’s a referendum that they’ve lost.
H/T: The Moderate Voice
May 21st, 2008 at 6:40 pm
After 20 years of Bushes and Clintons, the people want — to coin a phrase — “change.” And that means no Clintons, and no 70-something senator that’s been in the news for the last 20 years. To say that Hillary made mistakes, and that that is why she probably won’t be the nominee ignores the fact that people go to the polls and choose the nominees (to some extent).