Given that not enough super-delegates will vote for Hillary Clinton, what is she playing at? asks Breda O'Brien.
THE WRITER Orson Scott Card says that his wife, a Republican voter, has only one reason to like Hillary Clinton. When Clinton was asked what one item would she not leave home without, she replied: "Walker's mesh bags". They are little see-through bags in lots of different sizes and colours. Hillary uses them to organise her handbag, and therefore never has to scrabble frantically to find the one essential item in the midst of the junk. Mrs Scott Card promptly went online and bought loads of them, and her life is transformed.
But she is still not voting for Hillary.
At the beginning of the Democratic campaign, I disliked Hillary Clinton. Nothing, not even the cute and useful mesh baggies, has done anything to change that fact. From her cynical adoption of the proposal to offer Americans a holiday from tax on petrol, to her inability to concede graciously, she has done nothing but confirm my prejudices about her.
Given that it is patently obvious that not enough voters or super-delegates are going to vote for Hillary, what is she playing at? It appears that it not in the nature of the Iron Lady of the US to give up. She may still be hoping for a controversy that will make Rev Wright's views look innocuous in comparison.
She may be hoping that Michelle Obama will provide one. The Tennessee Republican Party, in that grand old tradition of negative campaigning, are running what look like home-made advertisements. The same clip is shown over and over again, of Michelle Obama saying, "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country". It is interspersed with ordinary Joes from Tennessee giving a litany of reasons why they have loved their country from the moment of conception. One sad individual has an armoury in the background on what looks like the wall of his living room.
Incidentally, in that clip, you can see Michelle Obama's impressively toned shoulders and upper arms. How she got them is an interesting story. She was mildly depressed, getting up to feed her baby daughter and feeling resentful of her snoring husband. She realised that if she were not there, himself would have to do it. So she duly took herself off regularly to the gym, arriving home in the knowledge that the two kids would be up and dressed.
Telling stories like that endeared her to Oprah, and no doubt to thousands of women who feel that their husbands are not pulling their weight. However, Michelle Obama's tell-it-like-it-is style is often less than helpful.
She said what she believed, which is that Obama's campaign marked a new departure, a new time of hope for America. However, to say that she was not proud of her country was a major mistake. Many Americans are patriotic in a way that is literally incomprehensible to a lot of Europeans. Hillary worked hard on painting Obama as less than a true patriot. He is also seen as being out of touch with an essential demographic, the blue-collar worker. Hillary has made that constituency her own.
The irony of it is that, unlike Hillary, whose father ran a small but successful business, Michelle Obama was raised by parents in much more modest circumstances. She went on to study at Harvard and Princeton, but she credits her success to her parents and to public education. She is much more of an African-American success story in the American dream mould than her husband.
Like many Americans, an ancestor of Barack Obama's mother owned slaves, and Michelle Obama is the descendant of slaves. If he is not "black enough", Michelle Obama certainly is.
Barack Obama has a distinctly different personal history to his wife, including a spell living in Indonesia with a brutal dictatorship in power. He was educated there in a Muslim school, although not a radical Islamic school as the Clinton campaign also tried to imply. This knowledge of a world beyond the United States should be seen as an advantage, but it is somehow being used to show that he is suspect. He then lived in Hawaii. Allegra Goodman, writing in the New Republic, claims that Hawaii explains a great deal about Obama's vision of life.
She attended the same private school as Obama, and says that to live in Hawaii is to experience the US from the inside and the outside. The inside view comes from pride in statehood and military tradition. Pearl Harbour made Hawaiians value American protection. The outside view comes from physical distance. She emphasises the divide between the haves and have-nots. "To grow up in Hawaii is to envision the future of a multiracial society, and also to view up close the disappointment of those left behind."
In order to beat McCain, Obama needs to connect with the "disappointment of those left behind". It is seen as a great coup that John Edwards endorsed him, and there is even talk of a vice-presidency because of Edwards's wider appeal among the "have-nots" of US society. Mind you, it was not exactly an act of courageous leadership on Edwards's part to refuse to endorse him until it became clear that Hillary could not win.
To be honest, I think the pair of them look too pretty together, too much like Hollywood versions of a presidential candidate and his running mate. And it will take Edwards a long time to live down that $400 (€257) haircut. More seriously, while Edwards appeals to conservative southern Democratic voters, he is more radical than Obama on a number of issues, such as abortion. Obama has been hinting that he will be looking for an older, white, conservative running mate, preferably from the South.
Here's a nightmare scenario for the vice-presidency. Will the super-delegates who found it tough to turn down Bill Clinton find it even tougher to turn him down again if he asks them to endorse Hillary as vice-president, even though Obama has made it clear that he could not work with her? Could that be why she is hanging on? Or does she reckon that if McCain wins, 2012 is still a possibility? Who knows? All that is certain is that it is always unwise to hope to see the back of a woman with an organised handbag.