Hillary's "Pugnaciousness": It's Down to That and Nothing More

In its straight reporting, not its editorial opinion, the New York Times branded Hillary's latest pitch "one of the most pugnacious political messages of her campaign."

Right now more people have voted for me than have voted for my opponent. More people have voted for me than for anybody ever running for president before. So we have a very close contest for votes, for delegates, and this is nowhere near over. None of us is going to have the number of delegates we’re going to need to get to the nomination, although I understand my opponent and his supporters are going to claim that. The fact is we have to include Michigan and Florida -- we cannot claim that we have a nominee based on 48 states, particularly two states that are so important for us to win in the fall.

Misleading math, a false assessment, an underhanded jab, a deceptive reframing of party rules. And to top it all off, This is nowhere near over -- after having repeatedly promised that this is, at long last, very nearly over. 

Pugnacious indeed, if not downright obnoxious.

One assumes that that latter statement will soon migrate to the hard news section as well, because, after all, obnoxious is precisely, objectively what Hillary's latest pitch is. In the absence of even the slimmest hope of prevailing at the end of this long and fractious road, the New York senator persists in stirring resentments and dividing the nominee's party.

By now, the nominee just yawns, while dancing ever so delicately on the heads of ever-changing pins.

A week ago Obama, in the words of his campaign manager, was offering that "On May 20, we’re going to declare victory." In his own words: "If at that point we have the majority of pledged delegates, which is possible, then I think we can make a pretty strong claim that we’ve got the most runs and it’s the ninth inning and we’ve won."

Pugnacious? Obnoxious? No, a matter -- a statement -- of mathematical fact.

Now, however, wary of offending perhaps the sorest losers in the history of primary campaigns, Sen. Obama, as The Politico reports, "will not declare victory in the Democratic nomination fight Tuesday in the event he wins enough pledged delegates to claim a majority" -- that final word looping synonymously back to "victory." 

The Politico put it a trifle more diplomatically: that Obama is "concerned about appearing presumptuous or antagonistic towards Hillary Rodham Clinton."

You gotta love it. "Presumptuous" is the victor matter of factly declaring victory. Non-presumptuous was Hillary Clinton offering the vice-presidential slot to Obama a couple months or so ago, when it was thunderingly clear that Obama would be the victor and party unity could have begun, right then, before it was too late.

Yet more evidence of seemingly acceptable double standards -- for one side only -- abounds: "The conscious decision not to declare victory is a revealing measure of the sensitivity surrounding overtures that appear to disrespect Clinton and her supporters."

Sure, that's just a political game, the rules of which Obama must follow. But others are free to be more honest about it. And the blunt honesty is this: If Hillary's supporters ever wish to recall what true "disrespect" is, they can start by recalling their candidate's specific elimination of Obama as a competent commander in chief -- an abominable, politically dishonorable stunt never pulled in a primary campaign before -- or their candidate's repeated and general elevation of Republican John McCain and disqualification of fellow Democrat Barack Obama.

The greatest disrespect, however, has been that shown by Hillary to her own base, who, as logic would have it, would fare far better under any presidential administration absent a preceding "R." The Washington Post -- again, in straight reporting, not editorial judgment -- assesses it this way:

The campaigns have sought to balance tactics against tact, so that the rift between the two Democrats -- and their backers -- doesn't grow so wide that the winner can't pull the party back together.... But the Obama-Clinton fight has gone on so long and the ill will has become so intense that even if the candidates can heal the party, as both have vowed to do, they will have to spend critical campaign time dealing with those wounds rather than taking on McCain.

In other words, the damage is already done, critical time and more to come are already lost, and John McCain is already the happy recipient of an unnecessarily long and quite free ride.

And to whose benefit? Hillary's supporters? Pshaw. Hillary knows better than that. And after today's anguished pointlessness, we'll be treated to 'round-the-clock coverage of a pointless Rules Committee meeting on May 31st, and then on to more self-indulgent but equally pointless primary days. After that, who knows? For as Hillary has pledged, this pointlessness is nowhere near over.