COMING off her surprise victory in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton won Ne vada handily. Not so, says the Obama campaign – which is proving to be as spintastic as the Clinton apparatus.
Obama’s people somehow managed to convince many in the media that they actually kinda won Nevada because Obama garnered 13 delegates to Clinton’s 12. (The New York Times even gave its “Hillary wins” story a subheading of “Obama 2nd, But Takes One More Delegate.”)
By this math, New Hampshire was actually a tie since both candidates walked away with 9 delegates. Yet Clinton has 210 delegates to Obama’s 123. So is she “winning”?
Of course not. But this is the level of discourse Democrats will have to stomach for the duration of the campaign.
We’re only on our fourth state, and the race is filled with nonstop bickering. Yes, that’s the norm for a primary – but, this year, nearly every major Democratic consituency seems to be turning against another.
In Nevada, it was the unions. The Nevada Teachers Union sued the state Democratic party to try to shut down new at-large districts that it believed unfairly favored the Culinary Workers Union, which supported Obama. (The teachers didn’t endorse, but the union president was a Clinton supporter.)
The purporse of moving up the date of the Nevada Caucus was to have more African-American and Latino voters involved in the process early on. The at-large districts were set up long before the Culinary Workers’ endorsement of Obama, in order to make voting easier for these groups.
Yet the teachers union sought to shut down these districts – which would’ve effective- ly disenfranchised minority voters. Fortunately, it lost.
The weeks after Obama’s win in Iowa saw a disturbing race battle that pitted blacks against the Clintons – and even, at one point, feminists against blacks. Gloria Steinem penned a Times Op-Ed that made many excellent points but, unfortunately, made the erroneous and unhelpful claim that it’s harder to be a woman presidential candidate than a black presidential candidate.
The media fueled the fires of the race fight, editing comments by Bill Clinton about the coverage of Obama’s record on the Iraq war’s being a “fairy tale” to make it seem he was calling Obama’s candidacy a fairy tale. (Who knew that phrase was racist, anyway?)
That, combined with Hillary’s comment about Martin Luther King Jr.’s needing LBJ to pass civil-rights legislation, was spun into evidence that the Clintons were playing racial politics.
The idea that Hillary Clinton would diss MLK Jr. is patently ridiculous, but that didn’t stop another fake controvery from taking off, this one causing rancor in one of the Democratic Party’s most important and reliable constituencies.
By Nevada, 83 percent of African-Americans supported Obama, which bodes well for him in South Carolina. Hispanics, meanwhile, went overwhelmingly for Clinton, which will help her in California and other Super Tuesday states, if it holds.
Whoever wins the nomination has their work cut out of them in unifying the party. Working to their advantage however, is the relatively little difference in their policy positions and the red-hot fire in the bellies of Democrats burning to win the White House this year.
Then there’s the Bill factor. The former president seems to make a cameo appearance in each controversy. Most recently, he lambasted a reporter who dared to suggest the teachers union lawsuit was problematic.
Obama adviser Greg Craig told Newseek that “recent events raise the question: If Hillary’s campaign can’t control Bill, whether Hillary’s White House could.” But this assumes the Clinton camp wants to control him.
When Bill Clinton says it’s a “roll of the dice” to vote for Obama, many Democrats might start to nod in agreement. The meme that took hold regarding Hillary Clinton‘s surprise New Hampshire win was that she manipulated women voters with tears. More likely, it was a combination of many factors, one being her husband’s stepped-up attacks on the lack of attention played to what he views as Obama’s thin resume.
Expect more of the same – on all sides – until the Dems choose their nominee.
Kirsten Powers is a Fox News analyst.