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Clinton will follow through with primaries, supporters say
By STEVE KRASKEThe Kansas City Star
All day Wednesday, topic one on the floor of the U.S. House was whether Hillary Clinton would drop out of the presidential race.
Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, a stalwart Clinton backer, heard it and pushed back with a firm rejoinder.
“Absolutely not.”
The Kansas City Democrat knows Clinton — “a woman possessed whether it’s running for political office, supporting someone for political office or pursuing legislation.
“She does not have a reverse gear.”
On Wednesday, after being crushed by a North Carolina landslide and eaking out an Indiana win, Clinton faced renewed calls for her to exit the bottomless Democratic race.
One of those came from one of her own backers, the 1972 Democratic nominee, George McGovern. Switching to Sen. Barack Obama, McGovern said Clinton’s chances had become “virtually impossible.”
But if Clinton was mired in self-doubt or deep thought over whether to exit, it wasn’t showing. The same day her camp said she’s lent her cause $6.4 million over the last month, she was in her usual mode — campaigning hard and seemingly looking forward.
“I’m staying in this race until there’s a nominee, and obviously I am going to work as hard as I can to become that nominee,” Clinton said in West Virginia, which has the next primary Tuesday. She also was meeting with undecided superdelegates, party leaders and elected officials who could end up the ultimate deciders.
That moving-ahead-no-matter-what approach is hardly surprising for a woman who’s battled levels of adversity far beyond that experienced by most people. Monica. Impeachment. Whitewater. The health-care debacle of 1994.
And this year, she’s escaped near-death experiences in New Hampshire and other states, struggled against some of the highest negatives in the field, emptied the war chest, faced an often hostile press and shrugged off accusations of pandering and low-blow campaigning.
“I think it’s obvious from the last few months that the Clintons are fighters to the end, and I think they have established a strategy of sticking out these remaining primaries through June 3,” said Leon Panetta, former chief of staff to President Clinton. “They’re going to stick to it and see what happens between now and then.”
The Clintons are unusual in the intensity of their focus, he said: “There is this very deep commitment to winning. That is who they are.”
Which leads to charges like this from Richelieu, blogger at The Weekly Standard: “Mrs. Clinton’s hand alone is on this throttle of Democratic fratricide and she appears to be accelerating the engine of Democrat destruction rather than easing it back.”
Yet her grit brings grudging admiration from others of her usual conservatives foes.
At the same time she drives the Democrats’ more liberal wing to furious distraction. To them, Clinton ambition is pushing the party to civil war while helping John McCain.
“You really can’t get more shameless than Hillary Clinton,” wrote AMERICAblog’s Joe Sudbay. “She, like her husband, will screw over the rest of the Democratic party for her own political gain.”
Discounting that dragging out the election is damaging, Clinton said Wednesday: “I just don’t believe that. I think we’ve had a historic record turnout by both of us bringing people into the Democratic Party.”
But the New York senator knows the ground has just tilted against her once more, said Carl Bernstein, author of a 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge. “She knows something huge has happened.
“She’s looking at her options, including, according to people I talk to who are close to her, perhaps ways in which she can use her leverage to get the vice presidential slot because (Obama) is not inclined to want her on the ticket.”
Bad blood between the two camps now makes many scoff at the “dream ticket.” The Clintons dislike Obama and believe he’s unqualified, he said.
But the agenda now, Bernstein believes, is to maximize her leverage where she can and hope “there’s a chance there’s some information out there they might stumble across that might keep them in the game.”
Clinton, he added, “likes this image of herself as a fighter, and it has served her well.”
Walking away from a race, especially one as prolonged and intense as this one, is harder than it might appear. Throw in her multimillion-dollar personal investment in her own campaign and the commitments of so many campaign workers and volunteers.
“It’s very difficult,” said Gary Hart, whose marathon run against front-runner Walter Mondale in the 1984 Democratic nomination race was until now the most prolonged in modern party history.
“It’s not just the admission of failure or the lack of success. It’s that you feel that you’ve let a lot of people down or not quite achieved what you wanted to on their behalf.”
In Clinton’s case, it’s a base of millions of women, blue-collar types, older voters, whose shift to Obama still needs to be seen.
Hart, who backed Obama early, said he entered the race never thinking he could win.
But Clinton was the early and prohibitive front-runner. And, at 60, is it her only shot?
Kim Wells, an aide to Sen. Bob Dole in his 1988 race, said facing reality that losing is inevitable is the first step.
“Most of these candidates, and Hillary Clinton is certainly one, are so determined and willing to work so hard and want it so bad that it’s hard to give it up,” he said.
Wells said Clinton deserves credit because “she’s been fighting tooth and nail, even though it’s probably been over for a month or two.”
As Hart said, “Not everyone can be president.”