The Uncle Al Election
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: March 27, 2008
When I was a kid in Cincinnati, there was a local children’s TV show that always featured a race. Little boys and girls ran around in circles for what seemed like a very long time, until the host threw up his hands and yelled: “Everybody wins!”
“Uncle Al,” said my brother, Gary.
The participants did not necessarily enjoy the experience. “I cried for hours,” said my sister-in-law, Laura.
The race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has now turned into one very long Uncle Al show. Everybody wins! Nobody loses! How do we make them stop?
The genius that is the Democratic Party has somehow managed to create a system in which two candidates can run for five months in all 50 states and neither one can possibly win enough delegates to clinch the nomination.
We should have known this was coming when people started talking about how exciting the Clinton-Obama race is. We live, after all, in a country where the Christmas shopping season begins in October. We have a sports calendar in which basketball leaches into baseball, which leaches into football. Too much of a good thing is our middle name. Now, the Democratic primary has become the McMansion of politics.
Many are the suggestions for how to make it stop, all of which boil down to making Hillary Clinton go away. The most entertaining by far is the call for Howard Dean to Lay Down the Law. Stop the bloodshed, Howard! The governor of Tennessee announced that as party chairman Dean “needs to step up and bring some closure.” Truly, anybody who believes that Howard Dean can make Hillary Clinton do anything she doesn’t want to do is living in Fantasyland.
Who do they think she is, the Clinton campaign mutters — some girl who’ll give way so the guy can get what he wants?
Anyway, Clinton argued, sitting backstage at an event in Philadelphia, fighting a cough, the voters don’t want it to be over. At her church on Easter Sunday, she said, people kept coming up and begging her to keep going. “We have people who deserve to have their voices heard.”
The church part is undoubtedly true. There are very few instances in American history where presidential candidates have been begged by their fellow parishioners to pack it in and go home. And there are plenty of other people who wouldn’t mind letting this go on for a while longer to see just how Obama fares in those Midwestern states that have seemed immune to his charms lately.
Right now he’s ahead by almost every conceivable count. The superdelegates, who will almost surely have to decide the nomination, have been around the political block a time or two. They know what a mess they would create if they seemed to be ignoring the popular will.
But the idea that Clinton would quit at this juncture goes contrary to every single thing we have learned about her over the past 17 years. She may irritate people. She may lose the health care initiative. She may even imagine that she was under fire in Bosnia when in fact she was standing on the tarmac accepting flowers from a little blonde girl. But she never gives up.
The one unassailable fact about Hillary Clinton is not that she’d make the best decision when the phone rings at 3 a.m. in the White House. It’s that if the phone rang at the same time that her polls were at 12 percent and her attorney general was under indictment and the economy was in the tank and California had just broken off and fallen into the sea, she would still pick up the receiver.
There isn’t a right or wrong to this argument — only strategy. Obama didn’t overexert himself to help find a way to let Michigan and Florida re-vote because it wasn’t to his advantage. And while ending the negativity would be nice, the Obamaites would mainly like to call a halt because they don’t want to risk something weird and undesirable happening. Hillary plans to continue in the hope that the weird and undesirable will occur.
“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think number one, that I would be a better president and number two that I would be a better candidate to beat John McCain,” she said. “I believe that with all my heart. Now, he may equally believe it. But I’m not about to walk out on these upcoming contests.”
I say her strategic desire to keep fighting trumps his strategic desire to put the lid on it. Even though there really is something very upsetting about a struggle that goes on and on and on without resolution. I know this because, with one phone call to Ohio, I managed to find three people who are still haunted by Uncle Al’s race. As we all know, three people constitute a trend.
“I used to dream that my family was sucked into the TV, one by one,” said Catherine Tape, who works with my brother. “They had to run in circles around our basement stairs, and I was responsible for getting them out. But I couldn’t.”
“Maybe there should be a support group,” my sister-in-law said.
Maybe Howard Dean would like to join.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/opinion/27collins.html?th&emc=th
