Jay Reding, quoting Dick Morris, calls Obama’s South Carolina victory over the weekend “pyrrhic“.

Morris:

By challenging Obama for the black vote – by promising to go door to door in South Carolina in minority neighborhoods, for example – Bill is highlighting the question: Will Obama carry the black vote? Of course, he will. He leads, 4 to 1, among African-Americans now.

But by making that the central question, Obama’s South Carolina victory will be hailed as proof that he won the African-American vote. Such block voting will trigger the white backlash Sen. Clinton needs to win.

Reding:

This loss certainly doesn’t look good for Hillary Clinton—she got creamed by Obama—but ultimately time (and the byzantine Democratic primary process) is on her side. The Clintons are masters of political hardball, as well as divide-and-conquer politics. They know full well that all they need to do is split the vote along racial lines and they can win—and it’s not like black voters will cross over and vote Republican in the general election.Obama won a major victory tonight—but it could end up being a Pyrrhic one. Obama must broaden his appeal beyond racial and class lines, and so far he’s been unable to do it. The demographic tide going into Super Tuesday doesn’t favor him, and while he’s dinged Clinton’s armor twice now, he’s yet to slay the beast.

Which is, I think, a good thing.

As I said on the show on Saturday – Obama is my nightmare scenario. Not because he’s presidential material, by any means – he’s a state legislator with not even an entire term in the Senate.

But if Obie wins the nomination, America may well go through the nightmare Minnesota suffered from 1998 to 2002, when thousands of the politically-apathetic turned out to vote in another fantasy based on “change”, Jesse Ventura. Obie is trying – in some ways successfully – to capture the JFK vibe, all “change” and youth and upsetting the establishment which he is, conveniently, a part and product of. Like Minnesota during its four year nightmare, we’d get an executive with no executive experience (actually, even less than Ventura, who was at least a one-term mayor of sleepy bedroom suburb), peddling phony “change” to an audience that only has to buy the con once for the damage to be done.

If the Tics nominate Hillary, the fantasy element is gone, and we can have a race based on the issues, the facts, and of course Hillary’s whopping negatives.

My emerging hypothesis; that Hillary is the Tic Bob Dole. She’s someone whose main impetus to run is that she wants the job.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 8:46 am and is filed under Campaign '08. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.