The day after working-class Wisconsinites plunged yet another dagger in the heart of her campaign, Hillary launched yet another, more strident and increasingly futile broadside against her party's prospective nominee.
"Let's get real," she bellowed to a New York gathering. (By the way, has her scheduler not looked at a primary calendar and accompanying map lately?) "Let's get real about this election, let's get real about our future, let's get real about what it is we can do together."
As the Washington Post described it, her words "reflected a mounting despair."
And both -- Hillary's exhortation, that is, for us to "get real," alongside her advertisement for "despair" -- reminded me of an interview I had watched the day before, the day in which working-class Wisconsinites were otherwise busy with their dagger-plunging.
The venue was "Hardball," the guest was David Wilhelm, and the infuriating interruptions, of course, were courtesy Chris Matthews. But on this day Matthews, among all his guest-interrupting sputtering, had something of actual value to add to his guest's insights -- and it just so happens the twosome previewed the nailing of Hillary's upcoming concerns over reality, despair and the gossamer possibilities of what "we can do together."
Matthews asked Wilhelm, who was Bill Clinton's national campaign manager in '92, later chairman of the Democratic National Committee and now an Obama supporter, if the latter was a "doer," and what, if anything, he could manage to get done as president. How "can he bring his big ideals to reality?" Matthews, as is his nature, rehearsed the question at length, but this time it was worth the wait. After all, Matthews continued ...
How does he [accomplish anything] in an environment like we saw like when the Clintons came into office in '93, and, immediately, people like Bill Kristol on the right said, we're going to kill health care in its cradle; there's not going to be any health care. Senator Clinton, then first lady Clinton, said, no I'm going to get the full boat. I'm going to get everything I want. Somebody wants everything. The other wants them to get nothing. We get nothing. That's what the pattern has been.
There was, naturally, more to come from Matthews. But in it is where he nailed the despair:
I think a lot of this country ... is sick of the 60 percent requirement to get anything done in the U.S. Senate, the failure of anybody in Congress since 1965 to do anything on any issue we care about, whether it‘s Social Security reform or Medicare salvation or it's climate change more recently or it's energy independence or it's balancing the budget. Any area, this government has failed us again and again and again. And people are tired of being in this rut. And they don't want to hear that one party is blaming the other for 49 percent or 51 percent of the trouble. They want one president to get 65 percent or 60 percent of the country behind them and get something done, I think, no matter whether it's Hillary or McCain or it's Barack.
With that despairing ball, one perhaps softer than hard, Wilhelm broke into open field, pointedly addressing the reality of Chris and Hillary's concerns:
I think the reason he's a doer is that he can be a 65 percent president, not a just 51 percent president. And what I mean by that, Senator Moynihan once pulled me aside when I was chair of the DNC. And he said, you know, David, the key to really bringing about societal change, big reforms, big things, is to pass them by large margins, to pull together a big, sustainable majority. And I fundamentally believe ... Barack Obama has the potential to build that new American majority, that 65 percent majority that can make change possible.... Because, in order to get things done, we have got to have a 65 percent majority. We have got to have a 65 percent president. We have got to have somebody who can work with independents and Republicans of goodwill.
And with that, down ... goes ... Hillary, if I may mix my sporting metaphors.
If her authorization to get us into this bloody Middle East mess wasn't enough to sour your progressive heart, the prospect of another bloody but stalemated '93 should be.
At best, Mrs. Clinton would just squeak by John McCain, occupying the Oval Office with the slimmest of pluralities. She would possess no reality-changing mandate. Congressional Democrats very well might achieve that much-sought 65 percent occupancy, but that singular voice of national leadership would be muted, compromised and besieged from the start.
Immediately, to quote Matthews again, people like Bill Kristol on the right would say, we're going to kill health care in its cradle; and from there on, pick a card, any card. More of the same, for four internecine and gridlocked years. In short, Congress would have no reason to fear a mandate-less Hillary as president.
And that, Mrs. Clinton, is "get[ting] real about our future" and "get[ting] real about what it is we can do together." I hear you, Hillary. It's despairing indeed.
Obama, on the other hand, has a realistic shot at reality-changing. As we're witnessing in the primaries, he could actually be that "65-percent president" with the mandated power to level parochial interests and bickering Congressional fiefdoms.
Obviously there's no guarantee that Obama can snap the back of national paralysis. But people are seeing at least that possibility with Obama, unlike with Hillary, and that's where their retirement of despair and investment in "hope" come in: "They want," as Matthews passionately observed, "one president to get 65 percent or 60 percent of the country behind them and get something done."