SPRING BREAK
It's spring in the northeast but it still feels like winter. Although the sun breaks through from time to time and reminds us of what is to come, the defining color is gray. Some birds are chirping but the vast majority are not here yet. So the mornings are still fairly quiet. When you take the dog out for a walk, the ground has the feel of a sponge rung once -- not entirely saturated but still wet. In Maine, they call this the mud season. It's a "tweener" time of year. We are caught between frost and fun, overcoats and jackets, long nights and long days.
So maybe it makes sense that the Democrats don't have a presidential nominee yet.
Barack can't win yet and Hillary won't quit yet. Some pundits lament the growing negativity of the campaigns, but I think they are playing with us. The pundits like this stuff. It fills air time. On the day after Easter, which is what today is, what would Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough have said if Carville hadn't compared Bill Richardson to Judas Iscariot? What would they have said last week, and the week before last, if Reverand Wright's rhetoric was not out there to be noticed?
You pretty much know when campaigns have run out of issues to brief and town meetings to announce. It occurs when incendiary comments long a part of the public record are dusted off and You Tubed so as to appear to be new. The Wright comments which so engulfed the airwaves for the past weeks define that art. The Reverand made the comments shortly after 9/11, or a little less than seven years ago. Did they just become offensive? Or relevant to the kind of President Obama would be? Is it really the case that no one noticed them until now?
The Wright stuff is perfect for the "tweener" season. It's of a piece with President Clinton's faux plea for a presidential contest between two nominees who both "love their country" (guess who he had in mind). Or Carville's Judas comments (made on Good Friday, in case all the Catholics in Pennsylvania weren't previously listening). Bored by their own wonkiness and realizing that going negative works even as they deny doing it, hell hath no fury greater than a candidate in a tight race. In fact, political handlers are the only people who embrace hell before their bosses are officially spurned. And at the end, the bosses -- that is, the actual candidates -- are too tired to stop them.
That is where we are now. In between. East of our political Eden. Caught in a seasonal dust bowl where winners and losers both get dirty, but no one stops them. When this sort of thing goes on in school yards, adults intervene. But the political adults here are the remaining superdelegates, and their silence for the most part has been deafening.
The "tweener" season never lasts. Gray becomes green. Sooner or later, that one bird sings a song in which others join. It is inevitable. So, Barack, rising in his great speech on race, and Governor Richardson, rising as his fellows remain seated, will not be alone for long.
Even the Clintons will join them.
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