On primary night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow put forward the argument that the Hillary Clinton Campaign will not only not pack up and leave the stage but that her slash and burn strategy is likely to continue. Keith Olbermann responded that for the first time ever, he disagreed with Maddow. According to Olbermann the Clinton campaign will cease the scorched earth strategy and assume a gentler and kinder posture until it finally goes away.
Two days removed from the primary results, it seems fair to say the Olbermann-Maddow dual is a draw.
Here’s what I think:
The Hillary campaign will indeed slowly grind to a halt. It is not so much the fact that it takes time for a humungus corporation as Clinton Co. to shift gears, as it is a psychological case study in how someone so obsessed with power and the presidency, and so seemingly close to it, can find her balance to step away.
In the meantime, the campaign will be encouraged to take it easy on Obama, but the campaign war horses, featuring Wolfson, McAuliffe and Clinton, will continue to make their case as they wind down, and the only case they have to make at this point is a negative one. Hence, yesterday, the campaign’s main talking point had to do with their new goalpost that she is the only one capable of building a coalition of white working class women that they say is needed to defeat McCain. Under any other circumstances, the fact that a campaign is now grasping onto the candidate’s ability to hold onto a white constituency when the opponent is black, is a form of race baiting, and would be treated as such.
The key, which Madow might have been alluding to is that the race baiting will continue, but as Olbermann may have been implying, it may now be cloaked in less inflammatory rhetoric, and
perhaps, the media will finally disengage, and let this once brightly burning star burn out on her own time table.
