Wednesday, June 04, 2008
The pundit class has gone hog wild over the latest Clinton gambit. This one's her campaign to win one person's vote to be the vice-presidential nominee.
I can see their point. It would be hard to engineer a ticket that's more fun to cover nor more fun to pillory.
Hillary and the pundits make the case that Obama is weak among women and blue-collar white voters. Coincidentally, Hillary's great strength is among women and blue-collar voters. Voila! Match made in electoral heaven!
Yet the logic doesn't hold. Sen. Clinton's only claim to strength amongst those voting segments is that she won their votes in a one-on-one race against Sen. Obama. If he's truly weak amongst them, her collection of their votes was no sign of strength. If, instead, women and blue-collar whites is for Clinton a great strength, Obama's failure to win many of their votes is probably not a weakness of his after all.
(To take an example that Clinton supporters can understand: Black voters. If Hillary had won the nomination and also hadn't worked so hard to antagonize them, she clearly would have won 80-90% of black voters in the general. Obama's strength obscured Hillary's matching, but lesser, strength in the primaries.)
There is some chance that he has a genuine weakness and she the genuine strength to match. The results of a zero-sum game don't provide that intelligence with nearly the certainty that the politicos in the media would have us believe.
I can see their point. It would be hard to engineer a ticket that's more fun to cover nor more fun to pillory.
Hillary and the pundits make the case that Obama is weak among women and blue-collar white voters. Coincidentally, Hillary's great strength is among women and blue-collar voters. Voila! Match made in electoral heaven!
Yet the logic doesn't hold. Sen. Clinton's only claim to strength amongst those voting segments is that she won their votes in a one-on-one race against Sen. Obama. If he's truly weak amongst them, her collection of their votes was no sign of strength. If, instead, women and blue-collar whites is for Clinton a great strength, Obama's failure to win many of their votes is probably not a weakness of his after all.
(To take an example that Clinton supporters can understand: Black voters. If Hillary had won the nomination and also hadn't worked so hard to antagonize them, she clearly would have won 80-90% of black voters in the general. Obama's strength obscured Hillary's matching, but lesser, strength in the primaries.)
There is some chance that he has a genuine weakness and she the genuine strength to match. The results of a zero-sum game don't provide that intelligence with nearly the certainty that the politicos in the media would have us believe.
Labels: Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, Press, Vice-President
