27 March 2008
Self-Violating Goodwin’s Law
Posted by Connor under: Elections; Politics .
Goodwin’s Law is one of the principal rules governing how people behave in online discussions. It states, As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
I’m going to do what a good moderator should never do and be the one to bring up the Nazi analogy. It is this. Like Nazi Germany circa Fall 1944, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is over. But her hubris is such that she cannot shake the assumption that the nomination is her destiny, facts and circumstances be dammed. So, she condemns all of us to slog on through a campaign of attrition to the bitter, bitter end.
The mainstream media is slowly coming around to the idea that there is no realistic strategy whereby she can win the nomination in the normal fashion. Jake Tapper at ABC news yesterday gives Hillary’s remaining gambits an appropriate, lower-middlebrow, blue-collar spin. He calls this Hillary’s Tonya Harding Option:
What Democratic officials across the country fear is what Clinton will have to do to party rival Illinois Sen. Barack Obama — who leads in pledged delegates and the popular vote — to make that happen.
“I don’t think she has no chance, but the route for her to victory is so bad for the Democratic Party — it’s to damage Obama so much that people feel he’s not electable,” said ABC News political contributor Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President Bush, repeating the sentiments of many in the other party.
One Democratic Party official called Clinton’s strategy “The Tonya Harding Option” — the idea that Clinton’s only path to the gold medal is to destroy her leading competitor.
After staying away from the controversy involving Obama’s former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for almost two weeks, Clinton for the first time personally injected him into the race.
“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said of Wright during a news conference Tuesday in Greensburg, Pa. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”
So thanks in advance Sen. Clinton for subjecting us to several months of metaphorical leg-breaking. A Battle of the Bulge and Battle for Berlin, if you will, and all the collateral damage for the party and for its White House prospects that such metaphors might suggest.
I’m sure that is the kind of positive, new-Democratic-majority campaign for change she had in mind when she started this thing.