Mr Weatherby

I am of the opinion that making arguments of questionable validity does unquestionable damage to one’s position — it makes you look desperate, like you don’t have any stronger evidence to put forth. If you have really firmly established your strongest claims, then it might be time to move on to advancing the more debatable points in an attempt to win the fence-sitters with whom the secondary claims resonate, but I don’t know if just shutting up about them entirely is necessarily a bad idea in some circumstances.

Unfortunately, I see large chunks of the democratic party — specifically, the Obama chunks — engaging in what seems to me like shooting itself in the foot via this sort of weak argumentation. To be clear on where I stand in this arena, I can think of about six hypothetically viable Democrats whom I would prefer over Senator Clinton, with Obama near the top of that list. I have objections with several different elements of her campaign, and I think that by remaining in the race at this point she’s doing a disservice to the causes which I have no doubt she earnestly supports.

That being said, I would kindly implore everyone to please shut up about the comments she made regarding RFK recently. I don’t see what the big deal is, and there are many much more salient reasons to disagree with the woman.

Here’s a recap: Clinton, responding to inquiries about her continued presence in the race, noted that her husband didn’t wrap up the nomination until June, and that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June as well. Once word of these comments got out, knickers across the nation became horribly bunched. Here’s some AP coverage of the back-and-forth between campaign PR people, and here’s Gawker dealing in a narrative which I’ve seen several places, which is that Clinton’s motivation is the notion, already advanced by some, that Obama will be an unduly appealing target to potential assassins. This is not only unfounded (in my opinion), but a perfect example of the problems involved with trying to win support through tertiary arguments. On one hand, you’re probably getting your base all excited — and I’m talking about the Obama base here, attributing such tortured reasoning to Clinton — but everyone else is not going to uncritically accept the notion that she is so callous and fear-mongering as to rest her self-justification on the contention that Obama is as good as dead. This futility of message would probably be true irrespective of the actual evidence, but even more so in light of the fact that, taken in proper context, people can actually Clinton was making a rather benign (almost insipid, really) historical remark. Here’s a youtube video of the exchange in question.

See that? In specific answer to the “party unity argument” (the notion that her failure to concede the nomination results most notably in continued infighting amongst democrats, which creates a net negative effect for democrats in general), she cites the precedent of two previous candidates on successful trajectories who were still active in their primary campaigns at this point in the year, who are not generally regarded to have caused serious harm to the well-being of the party. Her husband took a while to secure the nomination, and proceeded to win the general election. Bobby Kennedy was only stopped by his tragic and untimely death — i.e., he was still actively seeking the nomination in June, and the man is held as highly in people’s memories as anyone in the party’s history, probably.

The key thing, really, is that in this particular metaphor, Clinton seems to suggest that she is RFK. It’s not “RFK got shot and so will Obama,” it’s “RFK was still going strong and so am I”. She wants people to think she’s a noble proponent of principled stances, and that it’s more important for her to continue fighting for them than to concede; she would sooner be a martyr than a quitter, or whatever. Now, this is silly (because by most objective measures Obama is much more similar to Bobby Kennedy than she is, which might be where some of this confusion is coming from), evasive (because she’s really not addressing the dynamics of the current race and specific ramifications of her actions, just citing two superficially similar moments in history without analysis), and probably a little insensitive, but I think people are really overreacting on this. I mean, senator Clinton isn’t stupid — if she actually is pinning her hopes on the possibility that Obama’s parallels to RFK continue with tragic conclusion, she would have conceded gracefully and then arisen as the default replacement post-assassination, promising to carry on in the spirit of his legacy in these saddest of times, so on and so forth. Maybe she doesn’t want you to vote for Obama because someone will kill him further down the line, at which point his VP/running mate would take over, which a) stretches the RFK comparison and b) doesn’t resonate very well without a specific person to put in that backup role. I don’t buy it.

Going on about this makes it look like we’re splitting hairs. Some of the discussion is clearly being maintained by (relatively/allegedly) disinterested media outlets, but it wouldn’t have much cache if the Obama camp made a statement saying they didn’t think it was a big deal. Irrespective of the advancement goals for the Obama campaign, it’s really just irresponsible not to do a little digging to figure out what was going on with these remarks before lambasting the woman.

I suppose the take-away point here might be that Senator Clinton’s comments have resulted in drawn out, petty infighting between democrats, rather than using that time and energy to prepare for the fight with Senator McCain. It would seem as though there might be something to all this party unity business after all.