Clinton's Strategy Shift: From Inevitable Nominee to Soviet Scorched Earth

Hillary Clinton has realized an inescapable fact that is buttressed strongly by mathematics: she cannot win the nomination by having Democratic voters choose her in the remaining Democratic primaries. Therefore, this necessitated a political strategy shift. Clinton decided to win the nomination at all costs.

This began to set in prior to the Texas and Ohio primaries in the Clinton campaign. They realized that they needed to win Texas and Ohio on the surface to keep Democratic Party officials from calling for her to get out of the race and stop sapping the strength of Barack Obama, the eventual nominee. But the campaign also realized that it was mathematically impossible for Clinton to win the remaining primaries by a large enough margin to win the nomination with pledged delegates. Therefore she decided on a strategy that was very selfish but would get the job done: she would destroy Barack Obama's ability to be a winning candidate in the 2008 general election.

That push started in earnest in the run up to the Ohio primary where the Clinton campaign manufactured the NAFTA issue, using a Bush ally in the Canadian government as a source to say that Barack Obama was not serious about altering the NAFTA agreement but just posturing himself politically to win votes. This played strongly not only in Ohio, where unemployed factory workers hate NAFTA, but also all across the Midwest. It also brilliantly took the focus off of two issues that the Clinton campaign was loathe to discuss: it was Hillary Clinton's highly-touted husband Bill that made NAFTA possible by twisting arms in Congress to get it passed and Hillary Clinton's own representative told the Canadian government to take everything she was saying about editing NAFTA "with a grain of salt." The NAFTA issue pushed Clinton to victory in Ohio, along with thousands of Republicans that jumped party lines to vote for her because they believed that she would be the easiest target for John McCain in the general election.

Hillary Clinton can read the handwriting on the wall and, thusly, crafted a strategy going forward that not only gives her the best chance to win the Democratic nomination in 2008 but also positions her best moving ahead if she does not win the nomination. In shaming Obama and putting as much egg on his face as she can, she maximizes her chances to argue to superdelegates that Obama is too compromised to beat John McCain in the general election so they need to overturn the primary system and the voters and make her the nominee of the party. However, were that argument to fall on deaf ears, she will have crippled Obama for the general election. If Clinton can send Obama to defeat at the hands of John McCain, that positions her as the leading candidate to run for the White House in 2012 against the Republican incumbent.

This type of strategy is crafted by a candidate that is selfish and is not for the best interests of the Democratic Party and the American people. This type of strategy is coldly calculated to advance Hillary Clinton's interests above all others at any cost whatsoever. It is a sad turn of events but clearly an action taken by someone that believed they were entitled to something and a person that had no right to came in, ran a better campaign than them and took it away from them. It puts me in the mind of the Soviet WWII strategy in which they consigned their civilians to be brutalized by the advancing Nazis as well as seeing all of their possessions destroyed by the Red Army to deny the Nazis any kind of sustenance whatsoever as they invaded. The Soviets decided that it was in Stalin's best interest to destroy the entire country just so that would give him time to correct his own mistakes and storm back to victory later. Clearly this strategy telegraphs that Clinton is fine with four more years of a Republican White House if it is not her that will occupy the executive's chair on the Democrats' behalf. It is sad, it is hurtful to this nation by leaving in power the party that has caused so much damage to this country with its mistakes and miscalculations and it is patently a Clinton move looking out for #1.

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