Winning ugly

Winning ugly

US elections 2008: Hillary Clinton's victory in Nevada may be a hollow one if her husband continues to hurt her campaign

Michael Tomasky

January 19, 2008

Well, it wasn't big and it sure wasn't pretty - in fact it was downright ugly - but Hillary Clinton's win in Nevada gives her an advantage now over Barack Obama in the Democratic contest.

The effect of the result is perhaps most easily grasped by envisioning the counterfactual. Let's say Obama had won. In that case, the media would have been full of reports about how the underdog (which he assuredly is) had regained momentum, had knocked the powerful Clinton machine back on its heels a second time, and seemed primed to win next Saturday's match-up in South Carolina. In that state, and in the 22 states voting on February 5, sit hundreds or thousands of political operatives who, if Obama had won, would be on the phone with one another right now asking if they should go ahead and get with Obama, emboldening one another to buck the mighty Clintons. But now Clinton has held that effect off - at least for a week, perhaps for more, perhaps for good.

But she has held off such talk at a price. First, the win was narrow - not big enough for her to take a large helping of momentum into South Carolina. (While she won 51% of the vote compared with Obama's 45%, he managed to pick up more convention delegates.) I would expect that she'll still need a convincing win in South Carolina to start putting real distance between herself and Obama. And, as we know, it's the only state where he's been consistently ahead in polls.

The Nevada results can change that, which we'll start seeing in a new batch of polls in the next two or three days. Whether John Edwards stays in the race after today's anemic showing in Nevada may have a big impact on how things turn out next Saturday, as it's generally thought that he takes more votes from Clinton there.

Clinton may also have paid a price by dint of the fact that this was a dirty, bitter race. Obama didn't completely wrap himself in glory, and he probably erred in praising Ronald Reagan and calling the Republican Party the party of "ideas" in recent American history. But the Clinton campaign twisted those words and a lot more.

I don't know who on this planet has the stature to go face-to-face with Bill Clinton and look him in the eye and tell him he behaved in a discreditable fashion. His wife? His buddy Vernon Jordan? Whoever it is, someone had better stop him. He campaigned against a fellow Democrat no differently than if Obama had been Newt Gingrich. The Clinton campaign may conclude that, numerically and on balance, Bill helped. But, trust me, to the thousands of committed progressives who supported him when he really needed it, who went to the mat for him at his moment of (largely self-inflicted) crisis but who now happen to be supporting someone other than his wife, he's done himself a tremendous amount of damage.

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Bill

01.19.08
By Josh Marshall

I don't have a good answer to this. I don't expect Bill Clinton, who's not a shrinking violet, to be neutral in his own wife's nomination campaign. But I have to admit that the intensity of Bill Clinton's attacks on Barack Obama really makes me uncomfortable. I know there are a lot of Democratic party insiders, mostly older than I am, who don't like it either. But I wonder if there's not some generational aspect to it for people my age. I was in my early 20s in 1992. And really throughout the 90s you couldn't be a bigger Clinton guy than I was. So it's hard to see that history (and it's quite some history) leveraged to muscle this campaign.