"Closing the Deal"

I think that "close the deal" may very well have eclipsed "maverick" as the most tired expression of the 2008 campaign.

The conventional wisdom (which means that of MSNBC and CNN these days) is that Hillary Clinton's 10-point win in Pennsylvania means that Barack Obama "can't close the deal." This notion is based on two assumptions, both of which are wrong:

a) that any state which didn't go for Obama in the primary won't go for him in the general election; and

b) that any state which DID go for him in the primary won't go for him in the general election.

That kind of reasoning would certainly favor Hillary Clinton, wouldn't it?

It's a preposterous leap to assume that states like Massachusetts and New York and New Jersey are not going to vote for Barack Obama in November, unless you want to figure that they aren't going to vote for a black man -- and I think that's the subtext to the notion that because Democratic voters in a particular state voted for candidate A in the primary means they won't vote for candidate B in the general. Whether it's preposterous to think that states like South Carolina and Mississippi WON'T vote for Obama in November remains to be seen, and it's the fundamental difference in terms of campaign policy between the DLC wing of the party, which focuses on "sure-win" states, and the Howard Dean 50-state strategy. The wild card here is the African-American vote, and whether this voting bloc a) shows up at the polls in huge numbers, and b) runs into the same kind of vote suppression tactics it did in Florida in 2000 and in both Florida and Ohio in 2004.

Back when former Virginia governor Mark Warner was being painted as the Great White Southern Hope of the Democratic Party, the assumption was that he would put southern states in play that traditionally would go Republican. To say that Barack Obama can't do the same thing is to admit that black voters either won't show up or won't be allowed to vote.

This year seems to confound all conventional wisdom, no matter how hard Tim Russert and Chris Matthews and Brian Williams want to fit it into a box. Right now I'd be inclined to say let's just crown John McCain the King of America and get it done with and not put us all through this crap for another seven months. But then, I'm the kind of person who wants bad things that are inevitable to happen sooner rather than later so that we can deal with the adversity and get past it sooner. This thinking, of course, has its own problems, such as a tendency to think every time my boss is in a bad mood, "Go ahead and fire me already, nothing I do is ever good enough for you anyway so let's just get it over with!" (I actually did this to his face once, but that was three years ago and I'm still there,). So this thinking has its own set of problems and I don't recommend it in that circumstance. And if the Mayans are correct, the idea of "Go ahead and let's blow the whole thing up NOW and get it over with!" -- instead of this collapse taking until December 2012 when the Mayan calendar ends [Insert your own Hillary Clinton/end of the world bad joke here] -- means I'll never finish my novel or get the work on the house finished.

But I'm not sure that conventional wisdom holds here. I went to school in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania in the 1970's, and it was the most provincial, ignorant, bigoted, narrow-minded place I'd ever been. This was the place where a classmate asked me why, if I was Jewish, I drove such an old car. And this is barely an hour out of Philadelphia. I don't know how much it's changed since then, but given that Pennsylvania hasn't exactly become a hotbed of the information age, and the rusting hulks of the old steel mills are monuments to jobs that will never return, and they're still voting for conservatives out there, I doubt it's changed much. It's ironic, then, that the candidate whose husband signed NAFTA into law, which accelerated the closing of the same mills where Pennsylvanians used to work, was the victor yesterday.

Last night Pat Buchanan played the Adlai Stevenson card, drawing parallels between the thoughtful, erudite Obama and the equally thoughtful, erudite "egghead" who lost to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. And once again, the idea of presidential elections being about the First Beer Buddy came into the fore. But what do you expect from a country that's raising kids that don't know who the U.S. fought in World War II, that think either Dwight Eisenhower or Harry Truman was the president who resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, that can't identify Adolf Hitler, don't know that the Bill of Rights codified freedom of speech and religion, and don't know that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

Here we have a country that's embroiled in a war we can't continue and can't leave, oil is going to hit $120/barrel today, the global economy is on the verge of collapse, there are worldwide food shortages, and Americans are still looking for a daddy figure with whom they can have a beer.

Barack Obama didn't flip Hillary the bird, he scratched his face, something he does quite often. He's not a Muslim. He's not a Black Panther. He's not the Manchurian Candidate. What he is, is a leap of faith. A leap that says we can do something other than saber rattle at the world and ship all of this country's jobs overseas. A leap that says corporations shouldn't run the country. A leap that says that intelligence is at the very least as valuable an asset as the ability to run fast or slam-dunk or hit the curveball or throw an accurate pass. If we elect Barack Obama, the earth will not split open at the equator. The Scary Negroes™ won't rise up and enslave the white man. The world will not come to an end. Hillary Clinton doesn't believe that these things will happen either, but for whatever reason, she's decided that either she will have this nomination, or else she'll cede this year and hope to run in 2012 as the Great White Hope.

It's arguable, however, if we're even going to still be around then.