Sunday, May 04, 2008 - Posts
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Not only is it OK to admit being so over this endless campaign, it's all but required. Privately, even Stephen L. Carter must be fed up at least some of the time, with revulsion and rage and—where did that come from?—passion taking turns. I've started viewing it like any long-term relationship, in which just when you think you will never laugh at that stupid joke ever again—well, you do. And just when you're sure that if one more person says superdelegate you will run screaming into the traffic, you suddenly find that embarrassing as it is, you do care about Guam. Or so I can imagine.
You know who else seems sick of this Democratic primary? Barack Obama. Not that he’s phoning it in or anything, but a certain weariness seems to have set in. Which I take as yet another sign that not only is he not too elite, he might be too normal: He still thinks he can go off script sometimes, and he lets it show when he’s had it with trying to insist on a new kind of politics if all we really want to carry on about is flag pins. When Hillary Clinton says she would never have chosen Jeremiah Wright as her pastor, she isn’t kidding; you wouldn’t stick with that guy for five minutes if your every human impulse was run through the purifying filter of, “but how would that play in Scioto County?"
Yesterday, I talked to Christine Jennings, whose ’06 Congressional race for Katherine Harris’ old seat is, in effect, still going on. Jennings has been on the campaign trail almost every day since thousands of voters in Sarasota County reported having trouble casting their ballots on electronic voting machines in that one race—a race that according to the tally she challenged, she lost by 369 votes. In ’08, she still has the same old opponent, only he’s an incumbent now. And if that weren’t jolly enough, two weeks ago her ’06 primary opponent decided to get back in the race, too, as an independent. So as you can imagine, Jennings isn’t all that sympathetic when voters tell her how worn out they are with both Hillary and Barack. “I tell them, 'Don’t fall for that. That’s how all those Republicans on TV saying this race is dragging on too long want you to feel.’ (It was also the Republican-controlled legislature in her state, she points out, that cannily voted to switch the date of the Florida primary, and tucked that change into the wildly popular bill outlawing the impossible-to-audit voting machines that Jennings believes cost her the '06 race: “They knew exactly what they were doing.") “Democrats love to focus on the issues, and that’s good, but we need to focus on winning." And be willing to endure even the sight of Sidney Blumenthal trying to paint Obama as an old-fashioned '60s radical—yes, though that decade ended when the candidate was 8. Because if Christine can hang in there, so can we.
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A question for all of you: At what point does it become socially acceptable to admit that one is no longer interested in the Democratic primary? And at what point will newspapers stop treating the subject as if it should still be the focus of national attention? I rather thought we had passed this juncture a month ago when Nora Ephron, speaking for millions, described the primary as an "unending last episode of Survivor. They're eating rats and they're frying bugs and they're frying rats and they're eating buts; no one is ever going to get off the island and I can't take it anymore."
And yet it goes on: We've now had the Rev. Wright scandal not once, but twice. We've now had major newspaper and political blog coverage of the Guam primary, where the Hillary campaign declared that their candidate had "historic ties" to the island, Obama won by seven votes, and an apparently astonishing 4,500 people turned out for the election. The same observations about both candidates get recycled in different ways, to the point at which it's not worth reading the newspaper anymore.
The truth is that there wasn't—let's face it—that much new that we were ever going to learn about Hillary Clinton during this campaign: We already know more intimate details about her life than most of us know about most of our best friends. The excitement of the early part of the primary was learning about Obama and watching him draw even with Hillary. But that moment has passed, and we aren't going to learn anything else about him until we see him debate John McCain. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that one still isn't quite allowed to say any of this in public, as a degree of earnest political involvement is expected, at least from "Slate's women," and other community-spirited folk. Or am I wrong?
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