Hillary's Flimsy Case for the Nomination

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted April 5, 2008.

In the space of three short months, I've contrived to write two lengthy, gloating political obituaries for Hillary Clinton, only to see both of them blow up in my face after fantastic eleventh-hour comebacks that ended with scenes of the Hillmeister doing the dual flabby-arm raise on CNN while gusts of confetti whooshed across the room, obscuring almost everything except the shocking results blaring out from the crawl on the bottom of the screen. There was a time when this race looked like it might become the most uplifting in a generation. It's now threatening to become the most divisive and disturbing. It is a good time to ponder how that happened — and to address a few of the other Frequently Asked Questions about this depraved circus that is now poised to continue well past Pennsylvania.

Isn't Hillary Clinton better qualified than Barack Obama to be president, given that she is the more experienced candidate?

The idea that Clinton is somehow more qualified to deal with international crises because she has more "experience" is one of the strangest things I've seen the media swallow whole in a long time, dating back to the "tiny, sand-covered, yet-to-master-the-art-of-plumbing nation of Iraq is an imminent military threat to the United States" fiasco. According to my calculations —worked out over many hours, using long division out to eighteen places —Clinton is a second-term senator, while Barack Obama, conversely, is a first-term senator. By any reasonable standard, both are political neophytes.

Clinton talks a lot about having visited "over eighty countries" —but then, Chelsea was with her on a lot of those trips, and I doubt folks are rushing to hand her the red phone. In case anyone has forgotten what exactly first lady Hillary Clinton really did all those years, here is a press account of a 1997 trip that she made to Senegal with her daughter: "Her first stop in Senegal was at Goree Island, where she peered through the 'Door of No Return,' through which slaves passed on their way to the dreaded Middle Passage of the Slave Trade. When she arrived in Dakar, the first lady was greeted by Senegalese who danced and serenaded her with lyrics written especially for the occasion." Shit, I feel better about that 3 a.m. phone call already!

It is worth noting that Hillary was being packed off on these trips into the heart of Africa at precisely the time when her husband was getting his knob polished by an intern in the Oval Office. That's not a reflection on her personally —but for the Hillary camp to tout her advantage in foreign affairs based on these trips into the marital wilderness, as compared to a candidate who has actually lived overseas and has actual relatives living in villages like the ones Hillary passed over in her glass-bottomed boat, is beyond absurd.

When it comes time for delegates to vote at the convention, shouldn't they take into account that Clinton has performed better than Obama in the so-called battleground states? Doesn't she stand a better chance against John McCain in the national election?

In reality, the exact opposite is true. Everything about the results so far suggests that Obama is the more electable candidate according to the "battleground" voter the Clinton camp is claiming for their own.

The Clinton strategy for winning the presidency is so simple, even a chimpanzee could grasp it. You win the blue states, the Massachusettses and the New Jerseys, almost automatically, just by being pro-choice and saying nice things about trees and gay people. You concede the really red states, the places like Tennessee and Kentucky where you're fucked anyway, places where huge pluralities believe the devil really exists and has thick red skin and a bull's horns. That leaves you free to compete hard in the mixed-bag states by drifting to the right as far as you can without losing your in-pocket blue territories, which is really hard to do unless you start wobbling on abortion or selling out the spotted owl. It is through the prism of this new Clintonian strategy that presidential politics has basically been reduced to winning Florida and Ohio.

But saying that Hillary is better qualified to take on John McCain because of her performance in those states only makes sense if (a) you believe that the people who voted for Clinton in the primaries will not vote for Obama in the general election, and (b) you believe that no Democrat can win the traditionally red states. In fact, Hillary has mostly been winning the traditionally blue states —places like New York, California, Massachusetts and New Jersey —that are going to go blue in November anyway, no matter who is running on the Republican ticket. And even in the states Hillary has won, it has been registered Democrats, not swing voters, who have carried her to victory, while Obama has dominated her in virtually every contest among registered independents. Even in her home state of New York, Obama whipped Hillary among independents by fifteen percent. In Missouri, that margin was twenty-eight percent. In California? Thirty percent.

See more stories tagged with: hillary clinton, barack obama, election 2008

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Election 2008! Sign up now »