Cohen: Democrats slouching towards defeat in November ...
03.11.08 -- 6:48 PM
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen thinks the Democrats are digging their own graves preparatory to the November presidential elections...
By official count, The Post's 10th most e-mailed column of 2007 was published last June under the headline "How the GOP Could Win." It said that the Republican Party would promote national security as the salient issue of the campaign, making a silk purse (victory in November) out of a sow's ear (the quagmire in Iraq), and keep the White House for four more years. Increasingly, I think I might have been right.
It was Mitt Romney, the Harvard MBA, who left John McCain with what could be the winning business plan. In his campaign swan song, Romney used the two words you will hear repeatedly in the fall: retreat and defeat. Referring to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Romney said, "They would retreat, declare defeat, and the consequence of that would be devastating."
In my 2007 column, I compared this presidential campaign to that of 1972, when George McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon. The parallels are in some ways obvious -- the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq, above all. What I could not have foreseen a year ago was how much more obvious the parallels would become. Back in '72, the Democratic Party was split between doves and hawks, reformers and stogie smokers -- even between men and women. The result was a national convention that was boisterous, unruly and ugly to look at. That convention might, however, look like a tea party compared with what could happen in Denver this August.
At the moment, no one can figure out how the Democrats are going to get a nominee. What the party needs is someone like George Mitchell, a senior figure of trusted wisdom who might be able to do what Howard Dean, the party chairman, clearly cannot -- avoid the train wreck everyone can see coming. But barring either Mitchell or a miracle, neither Clinton nor Obama alone can garner enough delegates. It might take a combination of superdelegates and a revote in Michigan and Florida -- punished for holding unauthorized primaries -- to come up with a nominee. By the time that happens, the Democratic Party will be one huge, dysfunctional family.
Cohen could be right. Right now, the Dems have a lot going for them and if the presidential elections were held today with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton as their candidate they would likely win, perhaps not in a landslide, but win nevertheless. But if the tensions in the party eventually erupt into an actual civil war, November could turn out to be a bloodbath for them.
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