THE FOOTNOTE VOTE

THE FOOTNOTE VOTE 

She has lost men. She has lost women, She has lost blacks. She has lost yuppies. She has lost the college vote and the high school vote. She is losing the union vote. She is in trouble. 

But we now know that Hillary in fact does have a firewall. 

It is the footnote vote! 

For the past few weeks, Mrs. Clinton has repeated the charge that Barack Obama is something of a plagiarist. This is because he has repeated lines given him by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. The lines skewer those who claim Obama's speeches are "just words," with repeated invocations of some of the American republic's more famous bonne mots, followed by sarcastic questions that mockingly wonder whether these past clarion calls were just words as well. The riff works its magic as the audience hears Barack intone "'We hold those truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.' Just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Just words? 'I have a dream'. Just words?" There is a kind of game, set and match quality to this oratory, as there is with most of what comes out of Obama's mouth, before crowds larger than anyone else's and more enthusiastic by an order of magnitude. 

Alas, however, the "just words" riff was not original to Barack. It was Gov. Patrick's. To the Clintonistas, it is irrlevant that Patrick is one of Obama's national co-chairs, or that he specifically suggested that Obama use the lines, or that Obama admits he perhaps should have credited Patrick for them at some point along the way, however that is done on the campaign trail. No, Barack the policy neophyte now turns out to be, so they say, less than the Demosthenes we had all supposed him to be. And since, so the argument continues, words are so much a part of his appeal, perhaps he is less . . . appealing. 

Obama has pilloried this contretemps as "silly" and he is right. But apart from being silly, the charges being levelled say a lot more about his critics than they do about him. Over the course of the past few decades, we have collectively allowed our politics to be reduced to a sort of least common denominator sport. In that arena, the subtext is that smart doesn't matter and eloquence is phony. The current President touted his regular guy quality and C+ college average as evidence that he was the better candidate in both 2000 and 2004, disqualifying in one pass anyone who excelled in school or gave a syntactically correct speech. Words were a currency to be debased, not embraced, as W winked and nodded his way through malaprops while the ostensibly effete Ivy Leaguers "misunderestimated" him. He didn't care whether "nuclear" came out as "nucular," so long as everyone knew the regular guy from Crawford would kill the SOBs and not worry much about the sensitivities intellectuals had about things like, say, torture. 

There is a sense in which Hillary is stealing a page from this book. No one -- not even Hillary -- believes Obama is a plagiarist. He was given a line by a supporter and used it. From time to time, she has done the same thing, as has everyone else who has ever run for office. Plagiarists steal words and claim them as their own. No one stole anything here. Deval Patrick willingly gave them away; much like the legions of speechwriters who craft the eloquence most of our politicians claim as their own. 

For Hillary, the Obama problem is not where the words come from, it's that the words are so good. She cannot attack them. So she has spent the better part of the last two weeks trying to undermine them. The "they are not his words" charge followed the "they are just words charge," and then was itself followed by her "why can't we be friends" caricature of a putatively naive Obama long on rhetoric and short on reality. The problem, however, is that Hillary is morphing into everyone she claims to oppose -- the master mocker himself is the current President Bush, who has made a career out of ranking out opponents (be they members of the media or suitors for the same job) for their brains and eloquence, and the GOP playbook this Fall, lacking a defensible record, will belittle Obama for his vocabulary and cadence because it won't be able to attack him for his plans and policies. 

 Et tu, Hillary? 

Hillary Clinton is a lot better than this and should rise to that level rather than sink to Rove's. The Presidential race is a political campaign, not the defense of an honors thesis. 

Footnotes don't matter.

BARACK ATTACK

BARACK ATTACK 

Now that Barack Obama has pushed ahead in his contest with Hillary Clinton and stands a reasonable chance of being the Democratic nominee for President, the fear is that he will not be able to take a punch. First, however, his opponents (all of them) have to throw one. And so far, either none are, or none are landing. 

Whether it's Hillary, John McCain or right wing pundits like Charles Krauthammer, the attack on Obama thusfar is numbingly similar, surprisingly superficial and stunningly ineffective. It's some verson of the notion that he offers promises but not solutions (Hillary), rhetoric but not reality (McCain), or the snake oil of messianic hope that "dazzles" crowds even as it arouses "skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media" (Krauthammer). Victory after victory, eloquent speech after eloquent speech, Obama is now pilloried for a campaign that is supposedly becoming "dangerously self-referential" (Joe Klein). 

Puh-leeze! 

All of this is sheer rubbish. Not to mention disingenuous and false. Obama is winning because, for much of the past thirty years, the establishment hasn't delivered. His crowds are large and his rhetoric soars because he hasn't invested in the past and doesn't need to (and won't) apologize for it. Whether it's a war he opposed, a surge he knows is just a bandaid, or an economy that comes nowhere near delivering the kind of middle class created by FDR and his followers, Obama admits and tells the truths that the others either ignore or are partially (and sometimes wholly) responsible for. His rhetoric is compelling because it is real. The "solutions" Senator from New York cannot get traction because, in the Senate on the mother of all issues, she helped create the biggest problem we now have (in Iraq) rather than solve the one we already had (in Afghanistan). Ditto for Mr. Reality from Arizona. John McCain is consistent and has the courage of his convictions. But as George W. Bush has proved beyond any doubt, one can have consistent convictions that are consistently wrong. 

There's also nothing "dangerously self-referential" or "messianic" about Obama's appeal. For starters, it's hard to get a grip on what, precisely, this charge means. The rugged individualists, rich entrepreneurs and devotees of Ronald Reagan (messiah, anyone?) who make up the Republican Party are self-referential to a man. They just call it individual responsibility. They also think that is a good thing, one that more or less ought to be the foundation of most public policies. Barack is just stealing their thunder, the first Democratic politician since JFK to "ask not." When Obama says "We are the change that we seek," he's offering Americans hard work and responsibility for their future, not salvation. When he tells crowds that he is relying on them more than they are on him, he is repeating an old lesson in democratic self-governance -- that change comes not from those in charge but from those who are charged; that we get the government we elect, not the government we deserve; that the people are more important than the President. None of this is self-referential. It's the precise opposite. 

 No candidate has yet issued a bill of particulars against Barack. Hillary allegedly refuses to "whoop it up" Barack-like in deference to her ostensibly more honest and humble devotion to tough choices and real solutions. And McCain denounces Obama's speeches as "platitudes" masking as policies. Neither sound bite has touched the Illinois Senator. Today, however, Charles Krauthammer tried a different (albeit related) tack. He wrote: Obama is "going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can't possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war". Krauthammer thinks this "spell" can last just past an Obama inauguration. Following that, he foresees a "rude awakening." 

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. Obama hasn't promised to heal the world with negotiation. He has simply made the unremarkable observation that the world has never moved down that road without it. As for entitlement reform, the solution has eluded Krauthammer's generation, not Obama's. The kids at his rallies don't think they're getting Social Security or Medicare, they do not much like that, and they know that, with two reforms (increasing the earnings subject to payroll tax and moving the retirement age up slightly) Social Security could be sound. The solutions do not elude them. Nor do the costs. They are willing to pay higher taxes once they become millionaires. And they know a war that is off budget and cost billions each week is a source of funds if only it can be stopped. 

 The gig may not yet be up for Hillary. She has an almost infinite capacity for survival, and she will fight to the last. It's also hardly up for McCain. He will be the GOP nominee and in November, he will be strong. But neither one of them will beat Barack if what we've seen to date from both is the sum and substance of their argument against him. Anyone who wants 10-point plans on everything from health care to entitlement reform to Iraq can get it from any of these candidates. Just go to their websites. It's all there. All the reality, all the solutions, all the policy you could want. Obama's is no less detailed than Hillary's or McCain's. And if the websites are not sufficient, just replay the debates -- 18 of them with Barack and Hillary on the stage, covering the policy waterfront, which is why everyone now knows that he's for universal access and she's for a universal mandate. It's as real as it gets. 

But my wife -- who was the Legislative Director for a senior Congressman in the '80s and early '90s and has worked a half dozen campaigns -- says none of that will ultimately matter. And she may be right. 

Because while they keep telling us what they will do, Barack Obama keeps telling us what we can do.