After a gruelling campaign season, and following the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, it is safe to conclude that Barack Obama is going to the the presidential niminee of the Democratic Party. This near-irreversible fact seems to have dawned even on a red-faced Bill Clinton on the night of May 6th, even as his wife stood there declaring on TV that the fight would go on. The fight might go on, but it is no longer her fight to fight, or to win.
Sen. Clinton has claimed for some time now that she is the stronger Democratic candidate against McCain, and even that Sen. Obama cannot win the presidency in November. She is entitled to ber belief.
She has argued that she is more electable than Obama, and her campaign and surrogates have spinned any number of yarns to prove their point. But Obama has, almost since Iowa and New Hampshire, maintained a comfortable lead in terms of all the metrics that matter: pledged delegates, votes actually cast and states won! How can a candidate be more electable that an opponent who is now almost irreversibly (and increasingly)ahead? Wishful thinking is fine, but not so publicly. Not when it is so destructive of the democratic process and the Democratic Party -- and of what has so far been a much respected Clinton legacy.
The heated contest among Democrats has highlighted certain tendencies which, in the eyes of foreign observers, would make one dread a Clinton back in the White House. How so? First, the persistent push by the Clinton camp to seat Florida and Michigan delegates, despite the acknowledged flaunting of DNC election rules in the two states, suggests that a Clinton II presidency would be no respecter of international rules of the game -- so long as these rules did not favour America. As far as national politics go around the world, such behaviour is, unfortunately, too Third Wordly (or, shall I say, too Banana Republican?). As in all games, the game of politics must be rule-based -- rules agreed on in advance. This is the message we are trying to deliver to our leaders in the Third World, against many odds We shouldn't have to sensitize a Clinton, too!
Second, the very negative campaign which the Clinton side has waged against Obama -- often laced with innuendo (as in Obama's "true" faith and the quality of his associates), half-truths and non-truths (as in the Bosnia saga), half-baked standards of propriety (as in the Wright controversy -- she hasn't left her own Methodist Church, and she didn't leave Bill), pandering (as in the the threat to "obliterate Iran"; and in the gas tax proposal for this summer, which will be months before a Democrat can reclaim White House) and, worst of all, plain illogicality (as in her claimed superior electability and more) -- suggests that were Hillary to become President then "kitchen sink" at, and woe unto, any leader around the world who might take a stand contrary to hers on any major issue.
It is amazing that Obama has survived all this sustained attempt to wreck his campaign, discredit his character, and "put him in his place". Probably he truly has the Reaganite "teflon factor". Now, as I understand it, Clinton's more Machiavellian surrogates want to add blackmail to all that: if Obama is to be the Presidential nominee, then he must have Hillary as his running mate! The question must be asked, however: what real value would she add to the Obama administration -- after all the bitterness, and given her own revealed character? The two just don't seem compatible, as Pelosi seemed to suggest a few weeks ago.
Am I biased in all of this? Probably, being Kenyan -- and alert to the singularity and historicity of Obama's political journey; and its connectedness with the other journeys of his forbears. I have probably watched Hillary's moves too keenly and critiqued them too minutely -- and therefore, in the heat of the moment, unfairly. And though I have been an observer of US politics since the early Sixties (starting with JFK, and all that stuff about Catholicism and West Virginia and Lyndon Johnson and the voting-dead of Chicago), I have probably lost sight of the fact, if a fact it is, that what I see as an avoidable weakness in her campaign is too common a feature of US Presidential campaigns.
In conclusion, I venture a qualitative prediction (a predictive deduction)this early, based on such stated policy positions as I have come across, multi-media accounts so far of voter response, Internet chatter, voting patterns during the primary season, candidates' body language and the extant political and socio-economic context: Obama beats McCain in November and becomes US President.
