Why Clinton will prevail
John Sasso
SOME RAINDROPS have started to fall on Senator Hillary Clinton's parade to the Democratic presidential nomination. In the early primary races of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, rival Barack Obama has pulled even or ahead and the longstanding Clinton badge of elective inevitability has come under question.
Despite the Barack Obama zeal, I believe Clinton will prevail. And if she is the nominee, I believe she is the most electable and least vulnerable Democratic candidate to face the Republicans.
I was more uncertain a year ago when she announced her candidacy. Then she had recognizable strengths but at the same time possessed familiar handicaps both political and personal. She was routinely portrayed as contrived, a woman whose high intelligence had an impersonal edge and whose real identity was difficult to locate.
That was then. Today Clinton has forged herself into a formidable political leader. She has undergone a remarkable journey. In the face of unending autopsies on her personal and political past, unrelieved targeting at both Democratic and Republican debates, the punishing demands imposed on a woman candidate, she is still standing unflinchingly in place.
This is the mark of thoroughbred candidates. They take the fire. They survive the wounds. And while voters relish the spectacle of office-seekers squirming under adversity, something else happens at the same moment. If candidates demonstrate they can bear that kind of public barrage with conviction and ready composure -- and Clinton has done that -- they cross a crucial threshold in the public mind. They are viewed as able to compete and win a national election and able thereafter to govern in perilous times.
Why the most electable Democrat? Because after a year of being tightly measured, Clinton has won a public acceptance that she has the intellect and inner confidence to do the job. She has reached beyond her political inheritance and shaped a political presence all her own. Hillary belittlers still abound, to be sure. She is still caricatured as calculating. But the senator has taken on some different markings. Gone is the defensive bite, on hand is a new openness to concede mistakes, often with glints of humor.
If she does capture the nomination, she will see her standing soar overnight. Nomination is a transforming passage. What was viewed by some as calculation becomes smartness, impersonalness becomes thoughtful deliberation.
Once nominated her campaign will undergo another transformation. Her candidacy will take on an historic aura as it confronts an historic question -- can a woman, this woman, be elected president? Americans will be caught up in crossing one of the country's great divides. Voters of both parties, not just proud women, will be favorably disposed to make that crossing. Americans like the good feeling of removing barriers.
This gender phenomenon showed up in the Geraldine Ferraro campaign, which I managed. At every stop, huge crowds turned out, eager to be part of history in the making. By campaign's end, two things seemed clearer to me: there is inherent goodwill for a woman seeking power but a far sterner demand she be up to the challenge. That higher bar asked too much of Ferraro. Clinton has already cleared the bar.
Why the least vulnerable Democrat? The day the Democratic nominee becomes obvious the Republican attack machine will spring to action. Always, the opponent is a target to be eviscerated. If Obama is the Democratic nominee, a man less intimately understood and less defined, Republicans will rush to manufacture their own brutal definition. Can Obama withstand that kind of barrage? Does he have the personal makeup to be as relentless as his opponents? Do past political positions leave him vulnerable? Because the risks are sky-high, these questions need to be reasonably raised and answered beforehand.
Clinton is well past negative redefinition. Unlike John Kerry's 2004 campaign in which veterans opposed to Kerry's candidacy challenged his war record, it will be difficult to ram a Swift Boat into her candidacy. If there is a convict in her political past, as with Willie Horton during the Dukakis 1988 campaign, he will already have been exhumed. Besides, the Clintons are veteran enough to mount a withering counterfire of their own.
The most vulnerable Democrat, Clinton is not. The most electable, she is. America's political landscape, this time around, looks fertile for the right Democratic candidate. But one day, surely, the country will elect a woman president. I sense that moment - and that woman - has arrived.
John Sasso was John Kerry's general election manager at the Democratic National Committee in 2004 and manager of Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign in 1988.
