"Good Night and Good Luck"

[pnorman]

One of the oddest aspects of this extremely odd extended primary has been the entire press corps to indulge its fantasies of victory long after they lost any basis in reality. As one unnamed Clinton official admitted recently, "We lost this thing in February." Well, yeah. Politico's Jim VanderHei and Mike Allen pointed out in mid-April, "One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning." They cited a Clinton adviser putting her chances of success at 10 percent. Somehow, the punditocracy pretended not to notice.
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That was then. But once the nomination began to go Obama's way, the Clintons pivoted right. Hillary harped on Bill Ayers's terrorist past and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's lunatic statements and told an interviewer that there was no basis for rumors that Obama was a Muslim "as far as I know." Bill Clinton said he looked forward to her victory over Obama so we could have an election between "two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country." The candidate embraced McCain's intellectually indefensible gas tax holiday and, when questioned about it, repudiated a lifetime of high-minded wonkery by insisting that economists enjoyed no special expertise when it came to economics. Bill Clinton made the ethos of his wife's campaign explicit in Clarksburg, West Virginia, when he announced, "The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules." His target was not the corporate elite but a liberal black man raised, like himself, by a lower-middle-class single mother.
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080602/alterman

pnorman
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