Hillary and Barack -- Star-Cross'd Democrats

Watching the Democrats these past weeks in Pennsylvania has been ugly.  There has been none of the exuberance that characterized the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.  Little of the policy debates we were treated to in California and Nevada.  John McCain has been given a free month-and-a-half to self-correct his economic message blunders and embark on a tour of America's "forgotten places" (forgotten, I suppose, if you're rich and white and have no children in Iraq -- let's just go ahead and call you Republican).  He's spending the week in places like Appalachia, the Lower Ninth in New Orleans and Gee's Bend, Alabama, where white cops beat black demonstrators on the march to Montgomery in 1965.  Whether his Pander Tour bears fruit is yet to be determined -- he spoke to a mostly white crowd in Gee's Bend -- but it certainly won't hurt his chances in November.  Meanwhile, Clinton and Obama have moved into a clinch, trading kidney punches and low blows as they stagger towards the convention in Denver.  On second thought, "ugly" doesn't do this justice.  It's becoming tragic.

Two households, both alike in dignity,

  In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

        From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

           Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

Shakespeare was setting the stage for Romeo and Juliet, but he could just as easily have been describing primary season in Philadelphia.  Barack and Hillary, two sides of the same left-center coin.  So similar that it takes careful parsing to differentiate most of their policy positions.  It was just eleven weeks ago, at the debate in Los Angeles:

Obama:  I respect Senator Clinton...I'm glad we've been walking on this road together.

Clinton:  I have to agree with everything Barack just said.

At one point, Wolf Blitzer tried to instigate a confrontation between them and their response was:

Clinton:  We're having such a good time.  We are.  We are.  We're having a wonderful time.

Obama:  Yes, absolutely.

Fast-forward a couple of months to Pennsylvania:

Goddamn America -- He would not be my pastor -- I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community -- I remember landing under sniper fire -- We just ran with our heads down -- They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them -- Obama's remarks are elitist and they are out of touch -- I think that they played the race card on me.

It's not iambic pentameter, but if the arc from the Iowa caususes to the Pennsylvania primary isn't tragic, I'll eat my English degree.  By the way, if you want to remind yourself of what a real political debate sounds like, take a moment to review the transcript of that Los Angeles debate.  Compared to the travesty ABC moderated in Philadelphia, it's Lincoln-Douglass.  L.A. was a love-fest, Philly was mud wrestling.

This is what it's come down to:  the Democrats are eating their young.  Black against white, blue collar versus college degree, women against men.  The vision of an Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Obama dream ticket is shrinking rapidly in our rear-view mirror.  Those who argue the party will come together in November against McCain haven't been paying attention.  Pennsylvania exit polls detailed by the New York Times found that 16% of white voters said race matters and only 54% of those said they would support Obama in the general election.  27% said they would vote for McCain if Obama was the nominee and 16% said they would not vote at all.  20% of gun owners and church-goers said they would vote for McCain.  Only 60% of Democratic Catholics said they would vote for Obama in the general, 21% are prepared to vote for McCain.  

How did the Democrats arrive at this point?  Obama is practically the presumptive nominee and Democrats are jumping ship like it's the Caine Mutiny.  Clinton's strategy, stolen from the Atwater/Rove playbook, has been to depress the idealistic optimism of Obama's campaign while sowing seeds of doubt as to his character and electability.  It has worked -- appealing to man's baser instincts generally does.  Obama's overall positives have dropped considerably over the past few weeks.  The thing is, negative campaigning cuts both ways.  Clinton's negatives have risen along with Obama's.  And for what?  The warfare in the Pennsylvania trenches looks to have netted her a 9.2% win in the popular vote and fourteen delegates.  She still has no viable path to victory and refuses to consider an exit strategy.  It's the Iraq surge with cheese steaks.  

                Where be these enemies?  Capulet!  Montague!

         See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,

                         That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

And I for winking at your discords too

               Have lost a brace of kinsmen:  all are punish'd.

This is beginning to feel ominous.  McCain is running on the Iraq War, tax cuts and bailing out the investment bankers at the expense of those losing their homes.  And he's gaining ground!  Democrats can continue reassuring themselves that the party will reunite in time, pointing to Kennedy/Johnson and Kerry/Edwards, but this is different.  This time the opposing candidates are, for all their similarities, a black man and a white woman.  And it's becoming apparent that all the policy matches in the world can't smooth over that difference for much of the Democratic base.  Especially as they continue firing on each other, accentuating the animosities between the two campaigns and their respective followers.  

Let's hope, given the stakes facing the country, the 2008 election doesn't play as tragedy, to be summed up sometime in the future with a couplet:

                 For never was a story of more bitter drama

   Than this of Hillary and her Obama.