Irish should not get carried away by Clinton nostalgia
His premise that the 56%-41% win for Clinton was a rebuke of Senator Ted Kennedy’s late endorsement of Barack Obama, and part of larger decades-old feud between the Massachusetts senator and Bill Clinton (apparently with this round going to the Clintons), was an exercise in political hackery, and a poor job of it to boot.
Senator Clinton won Massachusetts, my home state, for two reasons: demographics and timing.
First, as exit polls showed, the Massachusetts Democratic primary voters were overwhelmingly female (58%) and nearly two-thirds (63%) were over the age of 45.
Both categories largely favour Hillary Clinton. She also won big in the few but still significant heavily Latino areas of New Bedford, Fall River and Lawrence.
Second, the Kennedy endorsement a week before the election was too late to be effective.
Clinton had a 20+ point leads in Massachusetts for months and the Clinton brand is perhaps as popular there as anywhere in the country.
In addition, Massachusetts has its own version of Barack Obama in Governor Deval Patrick. Elected in November of 2006 as an ‘outsider’ with widespread grassroots support on a platform of change (sound familiar?), Patrick’s first year in office was disappointing and his popularity has slipped. His stumblings may have made some voters hesitant about voting for Obama.
Finally, being an open primary and the Republican race having yet to be decided, large numbers of Massachusetts independents flocked to John McCain (evidenced by his garnering 41% in Romney’s home state), thus siphoning off a key constituency for Obama — a similar scenario occurred in New Hampshire only weeks earlier.
The case could even be made that by losing by only 15 points, along with his unexpected win in Connecticut, Obama provided the ‘surprise’ in New England on Super Tuesday.
While I understand the affection that Irish people have for the Clintons, they should not delude themselves into thinking that the election of another one of them to the presidency will magically right the American ship of state and return the world to the happier days of the late 1990s. Remember that, along with the Clinton’s intellectual firepower, come the shenanigans, real or imagined, that crippled Bill’s second term.
The real reason Ted Kennedy (and a slew of other big-time Democrats) endorsed Obama was due to the disgusting smear tactics employed by Bill Clinton during the South Carolina primary campaign.
His thinly-veiled attempt to portray Obama as merely a ‘black’ candidate, and circumscribe his support along racial lines, greatly angered many Democrats who feared a race war could ignite within the party.
The US faces many challenges at home and abroad.
For the first time in American history my generation faces the possibility that our quality of life may be worse than that of our parents. If we are ever to tackle the issues of terrorism, healthcare, global warming and economic growth, we need leaders who will rise above the dirty politics of divisiveness and dishonesty.
The Irish people — among them Niall O’Dowd — are right to believe that a Democratic president will be better on those issues than a Republican one. Most, however, don’t realise who the right Democrat is.
Brendan Hood
East Sandwich
Massachusetts
USA
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