Divvying up the Democrats

During the four or five weeks leading up to February 5th — ‘Tsunami Tuesday’, when voters in states with half the nation’s population participate in a not quite national primary...

During the four or five weeks leading up to February 5th — ‘Tsunami Tuesday’, when voters in states with half the nation’s population participate in a not quite national primary — the emotional texture of the Democratic side of the Presidential campaign changed profoundly. For most of Year One of this insanely elongated process, the Democratic Party had been a peaceable kingdom. Its voters were proud of and pleased with the array of choices before them: proud of its diversity, pleased with its unity. A confident woman in middle age; a graceful young African-American of mixed parentage; a handsome Southerner from a white working-class family; and a Mexico City-raised, three-quarters Hispanic governor-diplomat with (for a touch of mayonnaise) a blandly “American” name — these were the Democrats’ leading contenders… After years of talk about “looking like America,” here was the real thing… It was hard to find one who wouldn’t tell you something like this: “I’m supporting so-and-so in the primary, but I’ll be fine with any of them — just so we get a Democrat in the White House.”…

But as Iowa gave way to New Hampshire and then South Carolina, and the contest careered toward its ultimate form of a zero-sum game between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the mood darkened… The anger was mostly directed at Senator Clinton, her husband, and her campaign, for a series of what have come to be known, redundantly, as “negative attacks.”…

Obama has turned out to have a kind of political magic unseen since the Kennedy brothers of the nineteen-sixties. He has something of Jack’s futuristic, ironic cool, something of Bobby’s earnest, inspiring heat. His endorsement, last week, by President Kennedy’s surviving brother and surviving child closed the circuit. Senator Clinton’s answer to this is “I have more experience.” And it’s true. Her mastery of policy is deep and subtle; her sense of how the White House wields power is probably unequalled. But experience is a problematic argument, especially when voters are hungry for a new beginning. Anyway, an argument is no match for an aura…

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One of the arguments made on behalf of the Clintons is that they know how to win. They do what is necessary. They fight hard. They’ve shown they can survive the worst the Republican attack machine can throw at them, next to which the relatively mild roughing-up they’re giving Obama is downright Gandhian. But there are hard-nosed arguments for Obama, too. Nothing would energise the dispirited, disoriented Republicans like running against Hillary Clinton. And a late-entry challenge from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his billions would be far less likely if Obama became the Democratic nominee… Obama’s national-unity pitch should be viewed as a tactic as well as an ideal. It would not protect him from attack, of course, but it would enable him to fire back from the high ground… Hillary Clinton would make a competent, knowledgeable, and responsible President. Barack Obama just might make a transformative one.

Excerpted from Hendrik Hertzberg’s ‘The Spat’ in the February 11 issue of ‘The New Yorker’

In Odisha, Modi mounts ‘loot tantra-vs-bachat utsav’ attack on Congress over GST

India10 hr ago

Prime Minister Narendra Modi Saturday hailed the revised Goods and Services Tax (GST) structures, saying the era of “double bachat (saving) and double kamai (income)” has arrived under the Bharatiya Janata Party rule. Addressing the ' Namo Yuva Samabesh' in Jharsuguda, Modi accused the Congress of indulging in “loot tantra (tactics)” while in power.

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