VDH: The Year That Wasn’t
2008 was supposed to have been an ideal year for the Democratic Party. There’s an unpopular, lame-duck Republican president presiding over an iffy economy and an unpopular war. Plus, the Democrats won big in the 2006 elections, and there’s no Republican vice president in the race to draw on the power of incumbency.
No wonder that for much of 2007, the polls suggested that the only mystery would be by how much Sen. Hillary Clinton would beat former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the general election.
Indeed, for Democrats not to walk into the presidency in November 2008, the conventional wisdom was that the absolute unthinkable would have to transpire.
And now it almost has.
Even before the Wright controversy, the Democratic vote had been split heavily along racial lines - whites for Clinton, blacks for Obama - in certain states, including the all-important Ohio. That’s not a good sign for a party that’s supposed to be a model of racial transcendence.
At home, we not are yet in a recession, and may avoid one altogether. For now, despite financial jitters, mortgage fears and a weakening American financial position abroad, unemployment, interest rates and inflation all remain fairly low - and could still stay that way through the summer.
Many of our problems like gas prices and deficits transcend politics - or at least were due to bipartisan mistakes of both Congress and the administration and won’t play out to partisan advantage. There is no Democratic or Republican answer to stop Iran from getting the bomb, or to bring a roguish but increasingly wealthy and powerful China into the global community.
By late summer, a rested John McCain will try to reassure Americans that he will run their country just like he ran his campaign. A wounded Barack Obama will have won a Pyrrhic nomination. And an angry Hillary Clinton will be gone - but the latest addition to the Clinton legacy not forgotten.