Tag: Barack Obama

Over 1900 years ago, the prominent Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus pinpointed what he saw as the exact moment the great Republic fell. In his eyes, it was the moment when Caesar, undecided until the last second, finally made up his mind and crossed the Rubicon river. Ever since, “crossing the Rubicon” has been shorthand for points of no return, either when the returning is physically impossible, or when there’s just no point in trying because the goal isn’t any greater than the least effort required to reach it. The phrase is used for everything from the moment the first bomb drops in a war, to the moment you open the shrink wrap on your new iPod. Hillary Clinton’s just crossed the Rubicon. “Hillary Clinton today brought up the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy while defending her decision to stay in the race against Barack Obama. ‘My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,’ she said, dismissing calls to drop out.” –MSNBC Today, cable news and the Internet is filled with speculation that Clinton, who’s now invoked this RFK assassination rationale twice, is subtly encouraging – or at best privately hoping for – the assassination of Senator Obama (who has been likened to RFK for months now). Her campaign’s explanation, that she was merely mentioning that RFK was assassinated to point out another instance where the nomination contest went into June, has yet to gain traction. And there are a couple reasons for that. 1. Barack Obama recently won the majority of pledged delegates, he’s won about twice as many primaries, he’s within spitting distance of the 2025 delegates needed to win, Florida and Michigan aren’t going to be counted in any way that would hand Clinton the nomination, and her argument that she’s won the popular vote is being widely ridiculed because it presupposes that none of the caucus states matter, and not a single person would have voted for Obama in Michigan were his name on the ballot. The bad blood between the two campaigns, largely caused by Clinton’s gutter politics (or “hardball politics,” as her supporters have been excusing it), is far from assured a spot on the ticket as V.P. So the only way her now-quixotic quest for the nomination could succeed is if something cataclysmic happens to the Obama campaign. Something like an assassination. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be nearly enough to deny a candidate the benefit of the doubt. The Media, and even the usual suspects on the Internet, would be inclined to believe no malice was meant. However… (2) The Clinton campaign hasn’t exactly been reluctant to engage in code-speak in the past. After Obama’s wins in Iowa and then South Carolina, when it appeared Obama was appealing to whites, blacks, rich, and poor, and increasingly, young and old, the Clintons began a calculated attempt to marginalize him along racial lines. They used code words. “Spade.” “Rolling the dice.” “Shuck and jive.” They dismissed his South Carolina win by saying Jesse Jackson won South Carolina too (implying he won because he was black, and it was a majority black state, while completelly ignoring Obama’s previous win in Iowa, an overwhelmingly caucasian state). As her delegate losses mounted, Clinton became gradually but steadily more explicit in her race-baiting codewords, just recently claiming that non-college educated working class white people aren’t going to vote for Obama, and rightfully so, since he’s an elitist. It was a nice, uplifting euphemistic argument meant to communicate to two different audiences. To superdelegates, it was clearly meant to stoke fears that racist white people wouldn’t vote for the black guy in the Fall. To racist white people who were either too stupid or who lacked the opportunity to attend college, she was trying to say “he doesn’t understand you. He’s not like you. That’s ok, because I understand you, since I’m just like you.” I don’t know what’s in Clinton’s heart. I really don’t think she’s calling for Obama’s assassination. But I have to admit, the thought crossed my mind and lingered there for a few seconds before I managed to dismiss it. For a couple seconds, I didn’t know whether she’d simply made a horrendously bad analogy, TWICE, or whether this was a part of her distinct pattern of race-baiting, hatred-stoking gutter politics. I didn’t know, for just a couple seconds, whether she was hoping someone would help her, by proxy, assassinate her way into the White House. No commentator, journalist, blogger, or forum participant I’ve seen today (and I’ve read thousands of posts) seemed to know for sure, either, at least initially. It took Chris Matthews, a pundit who consistently dismisses conspiracy theories, several minutes before he decided he’d give her the benefit of the doubt. But the fact there’s been any doubt at all is exactly the point. A day ago – hell, 12 hours ago, I would never have entertained even for two seconds the idea that Hillary Clinton would want Barack Obama to be killed. I had never heard even the most rabid Hillary-bashers on the Internet entertain that notion, either. But today, we’ve all seemed capable, for however fleeting a moment, of entertaining that exact notion. And when we’re at that point – when so many people are able to think it’s a possibility that she’d stoop to something like that – there’s really no going back. Because for such a notion to be this widespread this quickly, a profound lack of trust in Mrs. Clinton must also be widespread. Perhaps so widespread that it, too, has crossed some sort of Rubicon in our political landscape. Some believe time is cyclical. That time is a wheel, that a thing that’s happened before is a speck on that wheel, and that someday when the wheel turns completely, what’s happened before will happen again. If that’s true, I wouldn’t be surprised if Suetonius, upon Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, remarks “Caesar has pulled a Hillary.”