The Voting Booth | As Obama errs, Clinton misses big opportunity

Allison Good Columnist

While Bill Clinton clings to Bosnia in an effort to save Hillary’s campaign and scramble for the co-presidency, Obama has created some “Obamadrama” of his own. New York Times blog The Caucus reported on Sunday that the Senator said, “Small-town voters like those in Pennsylvania cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them as a way to explain their [economic] frustrations.”

By insulting the demographic of rural-working class citizens, he has further alienated voters in crucial swing states who were most suspicious of him from the start. The Illinois senator immediately went on the defensive after this particular debacle, and a miraculous window of opportunity opened for Clinton.

This incident marks Obama as just another hypocritical politician, because his recent speech about race in America discussed the ideal of a more perfect union that transcended such boundaries. Working-class Pennsylvanians, apparently, are excluded from this idyllic vision.

The new remarks are a strong antithesis to the remarkable cult of personality that Obama’s candidacy and campaign have inspired. If Hillary didn’t already have 99 problems of her own, she could have ousted him completely.

I’ve never been a superstitious person, but it does seem as if the Clinton campaign has experienced some bad omens in recent weeks. Chief Strategist Mark Penn quit the campaign on April 6 after NBC reported that he met with representatives of the Colombian government to promote a free trade agreement that was vehemently opposed by Clinton herself. On April 11, a Clinton campaign office in western Indiana burned in a fire. And Bill just won’t let go of Bosnia.

Salvaging a failing campaign is no easy feat for the Clintons. Even in the midst of his scathing remarks, Obama is still guaranteed to come out on top.

Bill can’t seem to understand the situation, and he digs himself in deeper with each speech he gives. Every time the Clinton campaign is given a fresh start, either because of an important endorsement, a primary win or an Obama slip-up, it does not take the opportunity to revitalize its candidacy. Instead, the campaign opts for a self-destructive, time-bomb husband who needs to realize that a Clinton dynasty is a mere fantasy.

Wives of powerful politicians don’t seem to want to separate themselves from their corrupted husbands. We saw this phenomenon with Silda Spitzer back in March. Similarly, Bill has turned into Clinton’s Achilles’ heal.

Honestly, these past few weeks have been an agonizingly long break from the road to the November election, but hopefully the American people will know who to vote for after the upcoming Pennsylvania primary.

“A more perfect union” could not be a better way to describe what most Americans want for this country. Unfortunately, everyone holds grudges. Bill laments that he couldn’t have a third term, Hillary dislikes those citizens and superdelegates that have switched their allegiances and Obama is bitter toward enraged small-town voters.

When Obama and Clinton began to campaign, there was an infectious atmosphere of optimism about the whole thing, an excitement about really being able to change the country with this election, but it seems that now everything surrounding Washington is just the same as it always was. It seems that these candidates are just on a time bomb, and Americans are waiting for the first one to mess up in order to decide who to vote for in November.

—Allison Good ’11 is writing a weekly column about American politics, focusing on the 2008 presidential election and the primary process.