Clinton Campaign Chair Terry McAuliffe made a horrendous mistake on Meet the Press Sunday morning. In trying to show that all fair-minded people would want to see the primary schedule played out, McAuliffe painted a wistful picture of his father sharing a scotch in heaven with "Big Russ," MTP host Tim Russert's own father and centerpiece of a sentimental tome Russert penned a few years back.
"Big Russ, if he were sitting here today -- nothing's impossible," McAuliffe gushed. "Jack McAuliffe, if they were with us today, they're probably both in heaven right now, Tim, probably having a scotch, looking down saying, you know what: this fight goes on."
You could almost hear the pipes, the pipes a-calling.
There's only one problem with all this maudlin sentimentality. Big Russ is not dead.
Now, I could turn this into another Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference ("I'm not dead yet!") but that's sooo last month. So I'll go in another direction: M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense.
In this 1999 film, child psychologist Malcolm Crowe, played by Bruce Willis, is trying to help a disturbed little boy, Cole Sear, played by Haley Joel Osment. The boy claims visitations from numerous ghosts and explains it all to Crowe with one of the iconic phrases of modern cinema: "I see dead people."
"Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead."
Hello, Hillary!
The Clinton Campaign has been dead for over a month, and like a fish that has been rotting from the head (Penn, Wolfson, McAuliffe) for even longer. They're walking around like a regular campaign, taking donations, making ad buys, holding rallies. But the rest of the world has passed them by. Mathematics is as inexorable as time, and electoral mathematics is pitiless. Like Dr. Crowe, they think they're in charge, but they're really just dead.
(And don't come whining to me if I've just spoiled the ending for you. The film is 9 years old. If you don't know the end by now, you've been living on Planet Hillary. Get over it. Oh, and The Crying Game? She's a man, man! But that's another column.)
In the last half hour of MTP, Russert led a discussion where the panel enthused over the kind of issues-driven campaign the general election would be. But first they held a pro-forma inquest on the Clinton campaign. The unanimous verdict: death by suicide. How else does a first-term nobody from Illinois knock off the Clintons, a point Russert marveled over not once, but twice?
I'll tell you how: Clinton stupidity. They have an entire website, darwinawards.com, dedicated to stupid people who obligingly have naturally selected themselves out of the gene pool. And that plays right back to The Sixth Sense. A popular parody of the quote above that made the rounds of everyone's office e-mail begins "I see stupid people."
The Clinton Campaign: They only see what they want to see. They don't even know they're stupid, and dead.
Posted May 11, 2008 | 01:28 PM (EST)