Feeling her pain

There’s plenty of good reason to encourage a thoroughbred racehorse, winner or not, to “gallop out” after passing the finish wire. It helps the horse cool down and is said to aid in preventing post-race soreness. Some handicappers watch gallop-outs carefully, believing they’ll find clues as to health, strength, attitude and future performance of a given horse and jockey combination.

Some horses, it seems, "gallop out" past the wire for several furlongs on their own accord while others, sensing that the race is over, will slow themselves down and happily head for the paddock.

That's how we should think about the Democratic primary race these days.

Allowing a candidate who has run so hard for such a long race to have a decent amount of time to wind down with dignity would hurt no one and would likely help the Party.

Moreover, it is clearly silly, and disrespectful, for opinion purveyors in the media to continue to wonder aloud why Hillary Clinton is still running. They claim bewilderment that she has not done the math, seen the writing on the wall, and torn her campaign into little pieces. After all, in their opinion, Obama clearly can’t be beaten and there are only a handful of primaries left.

Even so, there are only a handful of primaries left, so why not indulge the voters in those states by allowing them to be part of the process? After all, Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy is obviously going to be in play this time around, and with this primary season drawing folks in every state out to vote, many for the first time, this fall’s election promises to be transformative.

Of course, it would be well if during this period there is an effort to cool down without destroying. In the home stretch of the campaign, it would hurt neither herself nor the Party should Sen. Clinton choose to turn her withering remarks to the Republican in the race.

Which brings me to today’s point: Though I have been highly critical of her for a good long while, I have considerable empathy for Mrs. Clinton; I do not have sympathy for her.

Like most of us, I have lost a battle or two in my life, some more important than others, and I can tell you that losing can be a little tough, or it can be really hard; it can be frustrating, and even infuriating; it can be excruciatingly painful.

Mrs. Clinton’s has not been a race that can be easy to concede. On the one hand I blame her advisers, who clearly encouraged her to believe in her inevitability from the very beginning, ignoring one of the simplest rules of politics, that nothing is certain and anything can happen.

On the other hand, she chose those advisers and chose to believe them — even, to the detriment of her campaign, exuding a sense of entitlement well beyond the point where she should have known better.

Her path, overall, is littered with mistakes, some of which have proved more damaging than others, but most of which might have been avoided had she simply opted from the beginning to run a plain-spoken and principled campaign — after all, see how Sen. McCain’s “straight-talk” reputation seems to have protected him from all manner of unpopular and even bizarre positions.

But it’s too late for Hillary Clinton.

Like the protagonist in a Shakespearean tragedy, she has been brought down by her own flaws.

As a flawed person, I can certainly empathize, but I don’t feel sorry for her at all.

Don't be fooled

Depending on how things work out over the next couple of months, Americans could find themselves faced with a daunting choice: To vote for someone with a record of pandering and not always being honest but you hope she’s telling the truth this time, or to vote for someone with a record of pandering and a reputation for straight talk and telling the truth but you hope to goodness this time he isn’t.

The recent hullabaloo over gas prices has been enough to set a political junkie’s teeth on edge, not to mention make grown economists weep and newspaper editorial writers run out of words.

Consider this: You might have to choose between John McCain, a Republican, who says he’d like to give America a “gas tax holiday” and Hillary Clinton, a Democrat who wishes to run against him, says that’s a swell idea, and proposes that it can be paid for by sticking it to the oil companies with a “windfall profits” tax — a tricky prospect, considering it would require both houses of Congress acting to pass that legislation between now and when school lets out. Congress. The House and the Senate. One month.

If you don’t see a problem there, then ask yourself: Will George W. Bush ever sign a bill imposing a new tax on anyone, let alone the oil companies?

Barack Obama, who opposes the idea, is catching all kinds of flak from the Clintons, who claim that he is “out of touch” because he thinks saving a family $0.30 a day, or $25-30 for the whole summer, is not worth the 300,000 jobs it would cost, let alone removing $9 billion from the highway funds that are used to fix everything from potholes on I-35 to bridges over rivers and canyons.

Well, Hillary did respond to that last week. She decided to say, instead, that it would “save the American people $8 billion.” Sounds more impressive, that’s for sure. Who among us wouldn’t love to have a share of $8 billion dollars?

But, you know what? Your share of that, given the millions of Americans who pump gas and drive, would be — ta-da! About $0.30 a day.

Not so fast, some would argue: What about truck drivers, taxi drivers, long-distance commuters, and farmers? They need a lot more gasoline and thus are hurt more by skyrocketing prices. True, but the reasonable point has been made by reasonable experts that we should and could help those folks with tax credits, something that would come directly from federal funds without abandoning needed highway repairs. And wouldn’t have to be accomplished in just a month.

Those weeping economists, by the way, are almost unanimous in saying that it’s most likely any tax reduction would just be consumed by the oil companies anyway, keeping prices just where they are. Because they can.

So, under the McCain/Clinton plan, instead of taking from the oil companies to give a break to the consumer, we’d be taking from the consumer to give to the oil companies. Great plan.

I’ll tell you what’s going wrong in America. It is not that we have a “red state, blue state” divide. No, the division in this country, when it comes right down to it, is between those who are content to believe anything they are told, without regard to source, and those who just don’t understand how they can fall for it.

I’m going to join that happy crowd that blames “the media” for a lot of what’s going on in this election season. In this case, I blame the TV media for hyping, ad nauseam, whatever story gets the most viewers even when it offers no enlightenment; the blogging media that perpetuates outrageous rumors without one scintilla of documentation, whether out of carelessness or out of bigotry or just hate for the “other”; and those of the print media that don’t find important issues important enough to spend the space.

The Founders felt so strongly about having a free press that they amended the Constitution to provide protection for it. After all, without a free press (think Thomas Paine), America might never have come into being.

Americans have always understood the role of the free press to be to watch and report on what their government is doing, and that the free press is essential to the survival of our democracy. When that freedom is abused by the media, in whatever form, we are being disserved and we should object.

Service is honesty; disservice is perpetuation of rumor or retelling of unexamined events.

And yet too much of our information is just that.

If the reporting we read and hear includes all the information that is relevant, and not just sound bites and what the reporters think people may think about them, then we will be better able to decide on an issue, or a President.

The great journalist Ambrose Bierce once declared that the vote, our most sacred right, is “The instrument and symbol of a free man's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country."

Let us not be fools.

Toilet bowl effect

In 1914, two years before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, a collection of articles by the esteemed Louis D. Brandeis was published under the title, Other People’s Money — And How the Bankers Use It. It was a sensation.

In 1991, after a successful run on Broadway, “Other People’s Money,” a play by Jerry Sterner, became a movie featuring Danny DeVito as a ruthless liquidator of moribund businesses.

In a monologue that has since acquired almost a cult following, DeVito’s character
explains to the stockholders why it would be foolhardy to try to keep their company in business when new technology was going to make it obsolete.

This company is dead. I didn't kill it. Don't blame me. It was dead when I got here.

It's too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing, we would still be dead. You know why? Fiber optics. New technologies. Obsolescence. We're dead, all right. We're just not broke. And do you know the surest way to go broke?

Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market.

Down the tubes. Slow but sure.

You know, at one time there must have been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw.

Now, how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company?

You invested in a business, and this business is dead. Let's have the intelligence, let's have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.

Last week I was complaining to a friend about a comment I’d heard on NPR to the effect that, in the recent Pennsylvania primary, Hillary Clinton had won “the core constituency of the Democratic Party” by taking more of the white, non-college-educated, working class vote than had Obama. I just didn’t see it.

Because I don’t think you can define the “core constituency” of the Democratic Party that way any longer, any more than you can claim the Republican Party base is still mostly made up of rich people.

Whoever Hillary Clinton won in Pennsylvania, the total vote for her was less than half what the most conservative estimates had projected, suggesting that the “white, working class, non-college-educated” voter either is not a certain voter for Hillary or that the proportion of such voters has shrunk — or perhaps both.

“It’s called the toilet bowl effect,” said my friend, going on to illustrate: When a toilet is flushed, a huge volume of water descends into the bowl and then whirls in an ever-shrinking vortex until it’s gone.

Hillary Clinton appears to be capturing an increasing share of a declining constituency, and Democrats would be foolish to take seriously her effort to persuade us that because she can win the “Archie Bunker” vote she must be given the nomination.

Pish and tosh, I say.

A similarly deluded member of the punditocracy reminded us over the weekend that ever since the 1960s (and its civil rights legislation) the only Democrats to win the presidency were from Southern states and he suggested that may still be true.

I’ve got news for him: The South has gone north, so to speak.

I was born and raised to the age of 12 in the South; I have lived in New York, Ohio, and California since then, and now that I am back, I am here to tell you: This is not your father’s Old South.

My experience qualifies me to speak with some authority about Yankee directness and California subtlety; about brazenly liberal folks in San Francisco but not so in some of its suburbs; about racism in New York, in Ohio and in California while better relations now exist between black and white folks in Texas.

And I can state unequivocally that one of the best things about the South, what I think of as the “dear hearts and gentle people factor” hasn’t gone north; it’s still very much here, thank you.

So, just as the Democratic Party can take heart that the “white, less-college-educated, working class” voter has, in the last 50 years, become less white and more educated; that the “working class” of decades ago have risen in skills and expectations; they will be well advised not to focus a disproportionate share of their money and energies trying to capture an increasing share of what has become a shrinking market.