Clinton Campaign Sees Dead People

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.

Comments

[VivianDW]

Collis and other "I told you so" soothsayers are giddy with the prospects of continual primary conflict. So,why demand that Clinton drop out ?? All the mighty writers who who attack her would have to find another target. Is it that most bloggers are misogynists? Are they afraid that Clinton will be tough and show "manly" grit instead of quitting "like a girl"? Or are they drooling to show their superiority over Obama and McCain?

I am so unimpressed by "know-it-alls" who have never won hundreds of thousands of votes and who have little interest in making the world a better place. The near-sighted "gurus" of the news make their livings on the weak of the week. They pile on the latest fallen "king of the mountain" like kids at recess shouting about their own macho heroism.

The primaries and elections are not about the pundits!!!!!!!!!

[egal]

Or maybe they are telling her to drop out because she's damaging the party and, far more completely, her own political career. Those who still support her have resorted to lashing out and have refused to check out the non-Hillary-delusion world, while she stoops to playing the racist card.

And she can't possibly win, unless you don't believe in math, so she's doing all that pointlessly. She has a history of abandoning causes and groups that she said she would help, and her toughness has never been in question--just her loyalty to the party over her ambition, her methods that have so set back healthcare reform, and myriad other things relevant to her lack of qualifications.

Pandering on the gas tax holiday issue, and then say all the economists were wrong because they were elitists not as attuned to the people as she was and dared to call her bluff, revealed a disdain for our intelligence and concern about values over cute little false tricks.

Nobody's attacking Hillary because they're misogynists (although you making that claim renders SNL's lampooning of her all the more trenchant and timely), but rather because she's a liability for the Democrats and would be a disaster for our nation and foreign perceptions of it should she do the things she has promised. Screaming "sexist" rather than bringing up evidence of her qualifications, and attacking bloggers for honesty, just makes you sound like a mere self-deluded follower of a self-destroyed candidate.

[jungpatawan]

You're right, I've never won "hundreds of thousands of votes" but I have won thousands and served my city as an elected Parks Commissioner, and my state as chairman of a park district technology committee, making my own little corner of the "world a better place."

And I have worked on campaigns that have won hundreds of thousands.

I have 20 years experience in campaigns as small as alderman and as large as Governor of Illinois. So when this "know-it-all" speaks, you may want to grant him a modicum of respect for having an inkling of what he is talking about.

Thanks for reading and commenting,

Chip