It would appear that "Bittergate" is just not that big a deal--Obama's polling within the margin in this poll, and the breakdown from this poll hasn't changed in the past week. So Steve Benen appears to have been right when he said that this comment wouldn't really matter. But it has been instructive. For one thing, it has reminded us of what a mediocre politician Hillary Clinton really is, and that she wouldn't be where she is were she not married to Bill Clinton.
I know that sounds a lot like Chris Matthews's comments that landed him in a heap of trouble, but let's look at this. Clinton is smart, knows policy, and has the political "killer instinct," which are all valuable political skills. However, they aren't the only political skills that a good politician needs. There is, for example, the ability to shape public opinion, which Obama has repeatedly shown and Clinton hasn't. Just look at Obama's recent speech on race for evidence of his talent on this, and try to find an equivalent Clinton moment on this. You won't find one. Both her and her husband are expert exploiters of public opinion (they're centrists, after all!) but they aren't paradigm changers. Obama might very well be, and that's what we need at this point if we want to get past the Bush years.
There's another thing: Clinton never seems to make her own opportunities, she just exploits existing ones. This is tricky, but it's what separates the great politicians from the not-so-great ones. Just look at Richard Nixon, who made his career as a Congressman by basically doing a bunch of red-baiting. Nobody else was doing it at the time (late 1940s) and this was way before Joe McCarthy. Nixon created an opening for himself as the staunch anticommunist and rode it all the way to the presidency. Another example comes from the U.K., where Conservative leader David Cameron managed to dramatically reshape the contest with Labour by inserting the issue of the inheritance tax into the race. Cameron created his own opportunity and managed to get Gordon Brown to postpone parliamentary elections. Clinton has never shown the level of creativity to pull something like this off, and her campaign this election cycle has done a lot of what she's been doing recently: pouncing on minor gaffes from opponents, launching feeble attacks, taking excessive umbrage at any criticism of her or her family. Her few attempts to inject an issue in the campaign--such as attacking Barack Obama's healthcare plan--have fallen flat largely due to a misreading of where Democrats are on this issue. Sure, many on the left would prefer a plan that is universal to one that is not, myself included (I actually do like Clinton's plan more than Obama's, truth be told), but most Democrats could give a damn whether everyone has insurance, they just want to know that they themselves have an option if they lose their job. So Salt-of-the-Earth Clinton is a bit tone-deaf about this issue--so much for her connection to the American worker. And so much for the idea that she's a center-left Nixon. Nixon was a bastard but he was effective. Clinton fulfills one of those qualities.
Additionally, Clinton's campaign has been less than impressive, to say the least. It's become clear to me that she's not temperamentally suited for the chief magistracy. Her panicky campaign has never missed a chance to try to tear down Barack Obama, and she's never given much of an indication that she realizes that they're on the same team. She does not have a long record as a progressive champion--indeed, a fairly compelling argument can be made that her newfound liberalism is only skin deep and will be abandoned upon winning the nomination. Just look at the evolution of her thinking on the Iraq War: when it was popular, she was for it. When it became fashionable to support the war but criticize its execution, she was doing that, too. And when it became politically necessary to argue for troop withdrawals, she jumped on the boat. There is a stunning lack of principle here, and I think it stems from her fundamental lack of interest in foreign policy. In this way she's not unlike an inverse of Richard Nixon, who couldn't care less about domestic policy ("building outhouses in Peoria") and focused on foreign policy. Nixon basically let Congressional Democrats run the store on domestic policy, and as a result Nixon's record on things like civil rights, the environment, and the economy are decidedly unconservative. Clinton only cares about domestic policy, and she's more than willing to let the Republicans define the terms of the debate on foreign policy, while Barack Obama has shown a willingness to challenge the Republicans on security and defense matters. Strike two.
In the end, the idea that Democrats would vote for somebody that the Republicans call elitist is a little puzzling. They're going to call whoever we pick an elitist, and in my impression Hillary Clinton gives off a more distinctly patrician air than does Obama regardless of her successes with working class voters (which is based more on identity politics than on anything else). The Republicans will call Obama an out of touch liberal elitist if he gets the nomination, and they'll do the same to Clinton if she manages to pull it out. This is what they do, and they've done it to every Democrat running for president in the past forty years. Their only hope is to stir up class resentments so that they can continue to intensify them. I don't think it's going to work for them this time: it barely worked in 2004, Iraq and the economy are both in much worse shape than they were four years ago, Barack Obama is an infinitely more talented politician than was John Kerry, and John McCain has a lot more baggage than his patrons in the media would have us believe. I just want this process to be over, and it's beginning to look like Obama might just win Pennsylvania. If he does, it will be over regardless of whether Clinton stays in the race--she'll have lost a 20+ point lead and she'll be damn near broke, and who's going to want to give money to what will appear to be a sure loser at that point?
