The Written Word: Rafe Mair - August 13

By Rafe Mair

Barak Obama will not be the Democrats’ candidate for president at least partly because Hillary Clinton has more politically savvy, has built up her support and has pots full of money. Some say that she’s no more than an ex-president’s wife forgetting that two father and son combinations have taken the White House, Adams I & II and the Bushes. Ms Clinton has every right to expect that her record as a Senator will show she is a mature politician. Her time as First Lady has taught us that she can put up with a lot of crap without losing her balance.

I’ve read Obama’s latest book, The Audacity of Hope, and as Churchill said of a speaker in the House of Commons, “he used every cliché known to man except ‘please adjust your clothes before leaving the WC’.” Obama has a one-liner for every occasion and it showed when he debated Ms Clinton and said that he would meet any leader in the world, personally, after he was elected. Ms. Clinton, who knows better, observed that to do that would confer respectability on tyrants, would send out weird if not calamitous messages  and would play havoc with many leaders who would take such a visit as an utterly gratuitous insult. As Ms Clinton pointed out, diplomacy is an art, the practice of which does not come easily nor permit one-line solutions.

Many observers of the American scene have not got used to candidates winning because they had it in the bag before the Convention. Now that primaries tell all, the age of the “men in the smoke-filled room” making the choice are long gone. Ms. Clinton will have it all wrapped up and tied with a bowed ribbon before the opening gavel.

What about Obama as a running mate?

Forget it. The Democrats will run the first woman for president but they’re not going to have the first Afro-American as her running mate. Ever since Nixon made the South into Republican territory the Democrats have been in trouble in Dixie and aren’t going to make those troubles any more difficult to deal with than they are. Ms Clinton will be looking to a white male who can bring some Southern votes.

Ms Clinton is and has proved herself to be a “liberal” on race issues but that doesn’t mean she’s going to stake her run at the White House on having two groundbreakers on the ticket.

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