This Week’s ESP- January 27, 2008

Time to predict what next week’s themes are going to be:

• High Broderism is still the Villager’s favorite governing style.  It doesn’t rock their little boat on the Potomac.  For those new to this term, High Broderism is the theory espoused by WaPo columnist David Broder that if the Democrats would just abandon every one of their core principles and reach out to Republicans and compromise with them, then, every pressing issue would be resolved amicably and we’d all have tea,  This is ridiculous, of course.  Because the cold hard reality is that Republicans don’t believe in compromise.  They are prepared to hold their breaths while strangling the country to get what they want and they are perfectly capable of doing it from a filibuster proof minority.  You can’t get around them with less than 60 votes in the senate and they are impervious to negotiation.  But it all sounds so harmonious and philanthropic.  So, Obama is running as the High Broderite candidate and pulling the young, independents and the college educated (but not necessarily smart) onto his side in order to win the nomination.  If he wins it, the GOP is going to paint him as the biggest flaming liberal whoever lived.  But getting back to High Broderism, expect this to be pushed heavily by the media using the clip of Obama’s SC victory speech as an example of what the country wants.  They will continue to pressure Clinton to abandon “partisanship” for the sake of bringing the country together.  The country doesn’t really want High Broderism.  It wants universal health insurance, social security, social justice, the rich to pay their fair share, labor protections, etc, etc.  But strategy is so much harder to describe in 30 seconds than an optimistic Change! soundbite.  If I were running, I’d turn this around on the media and ask them to identify what they mean by the terms “partisanship”, especially when it comes to a primary season where the contestants are supposed to be representing their “party”.  We’ve learned from the past 2 elections that running to the right of the party doesn’t work so appealing to the party in the primary season would seem to be pretty logical, especially if the rest of the country is on our side.  Emphasizing the differences between the two parties should work once High Broderism is defined as a failure.  One need only point to the well-meaning but feckless Congress as evidence of how it works.
• Obama is a cypher.  Expect Hillary to try to pin him down.
• Expect the Big Dawg to lower his profile.  Expect his every utterance to be misinterpreted and magnified anyway including ordering his coffee black.  I don’t agree with Josh Marshall when it comes to the Big Dawg.  If anything, Bill has held back.  Obama is an incredibly weak presidential candidate when you think about it.  He really doesn’t have much going for him other than an inspiring stump speech.  But the media is clearly on his side.  What I *have* noticed, however, is the consistent level of disgust across the lefty blogs with Hillary’s campaign machine and operatives.  I personally *loathe* Joe Trippi and David Axelrod and think they’re both disgusting, as disgusting as any Hillary operative.  But the antipathy runs against Clinton’s camp quite heavily.  I don’t know if this is genuinely earned.  Like I said, I find all of the campaign’s consultants to be overpaid shills.  So, I’m wondering if the lingering aftereffects of the Clinton investigations and impeachment has some of us conditioned to feel especially nauseous whenever Bill Clinton shows his face on TV.  I appreciate Josh’s struggle with his uneasiness but I just don’t find his explanation convincing.  I would definitely object if Bill was actively defending Hillary against unfair treatment but that’s not really what he’s been doing.  His attacks on Obama have actually been quite tame and Hillary has shown herself to be more than capable of defending herself.  She could do the next week all on her own with no one but Chelsea stumping for her and her strengths would no be diminished.   I think Josh has to think about this some more.  There’s something else at the bottom of all this disgust that probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you get right down to it.
• Expect Obama’s camp to start accusing Clinton’s of calling him a “Black candidate” in order to marginalize him. The fact that it was Obama’s camp that played the race cad to begin with will be conveniently overlooked.  Also, should be easy to thwart.  You know it’s coming.  OK, it’s already here and they are already pouncing on Bill Clinton’s statements about Jesse Jackson’s wins.  But here’s the thing, the only one who would have benefitted by stirring up racial tension in SC is Obama.  And he did it to win the majority Black voters.  So, now he has identified himself with black voters and he wants to be seen as a racially diverse candidate.  The rest of the country is sitting back and seeing this incredible blowout in a southern conservative state, the legacy of slavery still evident by the one room wooden cabins under the Spanish moss on old plantations.   We all know what South Carolina is or at least, I have a clue because I  lived there as a kid.  Obama was always going to win this state.  If he wanted to be a diverse candidate, he didn’t have to drive a wedge in the party with race baiting.  Merely showing up would have given him a nice win.  But that just wasn’t good enough.  So he pulled out all of the stops and got this wildly lopsided victory and has now somewhat defined himself.  He can bluster about the Jesse Jackson comments now and expect everybody and their brother to take his side but this genie is already out of the bottle.  Florida isn’t that far away from South Carolina and the south hasn’t been completely erased there.
• Expect DailyKos to go through another “Rec List Hostage Crisis” as the Edwardians try to deal with the next stage of grief.  But as flawed a politician as Edwards is, his core Democratic principles are closer to Clinton’s than Obama’s.  Something to think about.