Opinion: The Clintons shrug off defeat
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Pat Buchanan summed it up best.
Hillary and Bill Clinton Saturday night did their very best to treat Barack Obama’s surprisingly large win in South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary as ‘an exhibition game,’ said the one-time Republican (and Reform Party) White House contender who now commentates on MSNBC.
With every sign pointing to a loss for the Clinton team (though not the rout that occurred), neither could be found in the Palmetto State as the votes came in. Instead, each traveled to a Super Tuesday state: Hillary (the one who’s running this year) was in Tennessee; Bill (the one who ran in the past) was in Missouri.
Before he left South Carolina, though, Bill made a comment widely interpreted as dismissive of the win Obama was poised to register. Appropos of nothing, he noted that Jesse Jackson -- who in his presidential bids never fully escaped the ‘black candidate’ niche -- had won the state’s primaries in 1984 and ’88.
Merle Black, a veteran observer of Southern politics ...
who now hangs his hat at Atlanta’s Emory University in Atlanta, told Bloomberg News Service: ‘The implicit comparison is that Jackson won but he didn’t win the nomination. That is just another round of trying to devalue what Obama has achieved.’
Early in the evening, with Obama declared the day’s winner almost the second the polls closed, Hillary called from her campagn plane to personally congratulate her rival. The Times’ Peter Nicholas reports that her aides described the conversation as ‘friendly.’
Her public comments about the contest might best be characterized as terse. Indeed, her kudos to the winner didn’t even merit their own separate sentence.
Speaking at a nighttime rally in Nashville, she said: ‘I want to congratulate Sen. Obama tonight and I also want to thank the people of South Carolina for welcoming us into their homes and their communities.’
We imagine it’s a welcome she won’t remember as among the warmest she’s gotten. Anyway, that was that for South Carolina. She quickly segued to the future: ‘And I want to tell you how excited I am that now the eyes of the country turn to Tennessee and the other states that will be voting on Feb. 5. And of course to the state of Florida that will be voting Tuesday.
‘So millions and millions of Americans are going to have the chance to have their voices heard and their votes counted. And I can’t imagine any place I’d rather be than right here in Nashville as we kick off the next 10 days!’’
Not to insult the home of country music, but for Hillary Clinton, Siberia would have been preferable to South Carolina.
-- Don Frederick