Sunday morning, June 1. Foggy Bottom. The contents of the oversize envelope remain spread out on my kitchen table, photocopies of documents, carefully documented with two pages of footnotes. I haven’t moved for two hours except to refill my coffee. Time has frozen. I’m no closer to making a decision among disastrous alternatives.
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Quick check of the Blackberry. Our exit polls confirm her expected landslide in Puerto Rico, her last shining moment. Two inevitable Obama wins in South Dakota and Montana two days from now will end the long roller coaster ride of the Democratic primary season and she finally will have to find a gracious exit point. Yesterday’s predictable decision on Michigan and Florida by the DNC hacks, seating two reduced slates of delegates in a hollow victory for Hillary, didn’t substantively change the unforgiving math, ending her last hopes. A final wave of spineless super delegates wait for the last primaries to end before they declare their allegiance to the winning candidate. No one wants to back a loser, even a courageous loser, this late in the game. It’s so over for her.
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At least it was over, until this envelope appeared inside the screen door of my townhouse early this morning, left by an unseen courier.
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McCain’s people, clearly. A dossier on a series of incidents, detailed with delicious certainty and without trails, ripping a chasm in the Obama mystique that Ayers and Rezko and flag lapel pins and even the Reverend Wright could not. A train wreck for Obama. And a godsend for Hillary. That is, if it had dropped in our laps two months ago. But now, with Obama the all-but nominee just a few delegates short of clinching, a June surprise would be disastrous for all Democrats. A bombshell connected to the Clinton campaign would explode the party in a bitter rift as blacks, new young voters, college-educated white urbanites and the rest of the Obamaniacs decried the racist betrayal of a party that would allow the nomination to be “stolen” from the fair winner.
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McCain would sit back and watch the Democrats’ implosion, coasting to victory in an election with record low turnout and perhaps a riot or two. In a year the Democrats certainly should win back the White House following eight embarrassing years of ineptitude and cowboy diplomacy with only an endless war and a wrecked economy to show for it. How could they lose? Yet they’d be helpless to avoid self-mutilation.
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She would not be able to resist. Hard-wired like her husband for relentless pursuit of victory, only victory, she marches on, simmering, smiling, dying a slow death as she lately has had to ease off on Obama. The uneasy détente of the past few weeks since North Carolina and Indiana has been the hardest ordeal of her life, worse than the Monica embarrassment even, proudly persevering while refraining from any more tactical attacks on her upstart rival even as every instinct in her tells her to jab, jab. But that is no longer possible now that the party is coming together behind the new black savior and she is dropping out of political consciousness. Hanging in the balance is a future as a Senatorial lioness who might someday fill the role that the ailing Ted Kennedy will soon vacate. She has had to back off the kitchen sink strategy that has clearly weakened Obama because she has been unable to knock him out.
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It was only a passing embarrassment, her remark about Bobby Kennedy’s June 1968 assassination, insinuating that Obama could get bumped off and she was still needed in the wings, so off-message and insensitive it didn’t take much Clinton spin and quick apology to put it to bed, who would believe anyone could be so cold and calculating and politically incorrect to say that and mean it like some call for a hit? A mistake of the tongue, good old Cokie Roberts said on Good Morning America, hard to believe there haven’t been more in a campaign this long.
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So she moves on.
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But this would be different. Releasing this new-found pile of papers would amount to tying the kitchen sink around Obama’s skinny little neck and throwing him off the pier. How could she resist that?
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It shouldn’t have been necessary, of course. Mark Penn’s fundamental miscalculations put her in this hole. The clear leader going into January, Clinton bought the Penn strategy of going for the early knock-out, build an insurmountable delegate lead by Super Tuesday in early February. But the self-proclaimed polling genius had made a grammar school mistake, counting up all the delegates in big states like California that would clearly go Hillary’s way on the way to quick victory, somehow missing the fact that Democrats divvy out delegates proportionately, not in winner-take-all fashion like the Republicans or the general election. Obama weathered the early storm, then reeled off 13 straight wins after Super Tuesday building a delegate lead Hillary could never overcome.
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Dissension amongst the Clintonistas nearly sunk her ship in March. Half her campaign staff openly wanted Penn canned. The other half wanted him shot. Then came the flap over Colombia, with Penn’s firm openly lobbying for free trade status that Hillary opposed. Penn resigned his chief strategist position with the Clinton campaign but remained in the shadows continuing to poll and to provide counsel, such that it was.
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Then there was Bill. He seemed to be losing his velvet touch. The sly put-down comparing Obama’s success in South Carolina to a win there years earlier by Jesse Jackson was clearly racially dismissive. At Hillary’s “victory” speech in Indian, he stood behind her red-faced and puffy and beaten, sun-burned from a break-neck marathon across small-town North Carolina the week before, all for naught as Obama trounced Hillary in the Tar Heal state.
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For all the careful focus-group testing of messages and tactics, the campaign never filtered the surrogates. Hillary’s front team was riddled with ghosts of Democrats past, seemingly intent on reminding voters that she was the consummate insider in a year everyone knew was all about Change. Two low-water marks: Geraldine Ferraro’s assertion that Obama wouldn’t have been taken seriously had he not been black and James Carville’s tirade calling Bill Richardson’s switch from Clinton to Obama on the same level as Judas betraying Jesus. Carville was coyote bad on so many levels. Bombastic and bitter, yes, but also clearly speaking from an assumption that Clintons were owed a loyalty stronger than patriotism to country or conviction to ideas. And comparing Hillary to Jesus was over the top, even for Carville. Every time I see Carville’s shiny bald head and angry eyes squinting behind his wire frame glasses, I cringe. We’ve never tested him, of course, but I’d bet his negatives are nearly as strong among the general electorate as the Reverend Wright’s.
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But what’s the alternative? If I don’t send the envelope and its contents up to Hillary, if I stay mute on its terrible secrets, it will not die there. McCain’s operative clearly will leak the story closer to November. They’d prefer we Democrats rip each other to shreds, but if we resist, they’ll throw it out there themselves and let the press have their feeding frenzy. Hillary’s tenacity will be vindicated but too late to change the nomination and McCain will win the White House.
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My Blackberry dances on the table, vibrating with a message from the campaign. Hillary wants us to get down to San Juan this afternoon for a strategy session before her victory speech tonight. This isn’t unexpected; I’ve already checked the flights. I need to be at Reagan National in 90 minutes.
I can copy the papers and find a way to drop off the envelope at the Washington Post on the way to the airport. I‘d give it to someone to give to someone and not leave any obvious trails but it’s going have Hillary’s stink on it no matter how smooth the hand-off. Until she drops out it’s her mud to sling.
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Or I can bring the envelope to San Juan and let Hill and Bill and Penn make the call. Too messy; I don’t like it. She loses all plausible deniability if she ever sees it herself.
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Or hold on to it and don’t let it out. See if this meeting in Puerto Rico means she’s dropping out. Let Obama’s people have to deal with it later this summer or fall.
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Or send the envelope to the Obama campaign to give them a head start on some sort of explanation. The high road. But, sorry, it’s not going to happen. We’ve gone too far with too many bridges burned to help the junior Senator from Illinois.
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And it would be too risky. Somehow the Clintons would find out that it was me who sent it to Obama and I’d be labeled another Judas. They don’t get angry; they get even. I can’t afford to take the chance, not with two daughters to put through private college. There’s no job security in this business. We serve at the pleasure of the Clintons and lately there hasn’t been much Clinton pleasure to serve.
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