The beginning of her end?

Hillary Clinton: Class warrior?

One of the most amazing transformations in this primary season has been Hillary Clinton's shift in personas from heir apparent to scrappy fighter for the working class.

Remember the Hillary who appeared at the 2007 Yearly Kos blogger convention and heard boos when she defended accepting large sums from lobbyists? That was the Clinton who was positioning herself as the "inevitable" nominee and wouldn't "pander" to Democratic activists.

Today, according to the New York Times' Jodi Cantor, Clinton not only claims to be "a champion of ordinary Americans in a troubled economy, [she] has also tried to cast her rival, Senator Barack Obama, as an out-of-touch elitist. She has made her case at all the right stops (an auto-racing hall of fame) and used all the right props (lately delivering speeches from pickup-truck beds)."

This is certainly rich (pun intended). Hillary Clinton and her husband made $109 million since they left the White House in 2001. Clinton is second only to Obama in the millions in campaign contributions she has pulled in from a number of major industries--including Wall Street firms she targeted for criticism at an Indianapolis campaign stop, saying "Why don't we hold these Wall Street money brokers responsible for their role in the recession?"

The same Hillary Clinton got, earlier in the campaign, a Fortune front cover with the headline "Business Loves Hillary"--and regularly vacations in the Hamptons with the Hollywood set.

One of Clinton's attack lines against Obama is that he voted for a part of the Bush administration's bankruptcy legislation, and for energy policies that amounted to giveaways to Big Oil. All of which is supposed to show how out of touch with working people Obama is.

Fair enough. Obama deserves all the grief he gets for these craven actions on behalf of Corporate America.

But if Clinton were consistent, she could say the same and more about her chief surrogate in Indiana, Sen. Evan Bayh. Bayh, rumored to be on a short list of vice presidential candidates if Clinton were to somehow win the nomination, is one of the most right-wing Democrats in the Senate.

A darling of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council, Bayh voted for the 2005 bankruptcy "reform" legislation that took from ordinary people in debt the rights corporations retain--of wiping out their debts and starting over. Instead, Bayh supported onerous provisions like limiting the amount of home equity a debtor could protect and forcing debtors not only to attend credit counseling, but pay for it, too!

Bayh also voted for Bush's 2003 energy bill and supported most major pieces of free trade legislation--and this isn't to mention his hawkish and anti-abortion voting record as well.

Which is just more evidence that Hillary's populist posing is as phony as the idea that she drinks shots of whiskey in hunters' bars.

Will whites vote for Obama?

In the 1990s, the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council talked a lot about the necessity of Democrats winning over the "Reagan Democrats"--white working-class and lower-middle-class voters. The argument from DLC types was always the same: the Democrats had to be more "centrist"--or more like Republicans--to attract the white male "swing voters" who were the key to the election.

So if Clinton is using populist rhetoric now to appeal to working people, how come she and her husband deliberately steered away from "populism" in favor of "centrism" during their time in office? The reason was that "centrism" wasn't really a strategy to attract working-class voters or Reagan Democrats or "NASCAR dads." "Centrism" was about attracting corporate support for the Democrats.

Today, the white male swing voter is back as Clinton claims that Obama's weaker showing among this group proves he's headed for defeat in November. Not so subtly, Clinton surrogates like Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell suggest that white people won't vote for a Black candidate. Hence, the Clinton campaign's effort to pigeonhole Obama as the "Black candidate" and stoke the media frenzy around Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The tragedy is that all of this newfound interest in the working class is racially divisive--and when not divisive, merely superficial.

There are plenty of working-class people of all colors who would respond to a program from any candidate that took the issue of class seriously--that argued for making higher education more accessible, guaranteeing health care and pensions as a right, and supporting union rights and wages. Instead, we get silly spectacles of bowling outings and braggadocio about firearms training.

Indiana was supposed to be the big test case for Clinton. In a Midwestern industrial state devastated by auto industry layoffs and industrial decline, Hillary was supposed to be able to ride the white working class vote to a smashing victory over the "elitist" Obama.

But the exit polls available from CNN on election night show that while Clinton had the edge, it was hardly overwhelming. In fact, there was essentially no difference in the 52 percent-48 percent margin in favor of Clinton based on income, whether the dividing line was $50,000 in household income or $100,000. While Obama won households making between $75,000 and $100,000, Clinton carried the $100,000 to $150,000 group even more solidly.

Clinton had the edge over Obama among union households (54 percent to 46 percent), but they essentially tied 50-50 with non-union households.

Finally, the racial divide noted in previous primaries emerged in Indiana as well. But a greater percentage of whites voted for Obama in Indiana (40 percent) than in either Ohio (34 percent) or Pennsylvania (37 percent), suggesting that Obama is improving his standing--and this after all the hoopla surrounding Rev. Wright.

One thing bears remembering when hacks like MSNBC's Patrick Buchanan predict that Obama's second-place finishes to Clinton among white, working-class voters will spell doom for him against John McCain: Most of these dire predictions are made on the basis of data from primaries involving overwhelmingly Democratic voters--the majority of whom can be expected to vote against McCain no matter who the Democratic candidate is.

Gas tax follies

One of the big issues that was supposed to demonstrate Clinton's commitment to ordinary people was her call for a "federal gas tax holiday."

In one carefully arranged photo op, Clinton showed up to pump gas at an Indiana gas station. It was a wonder she knew how, since she has lived the last two decades of her life with government-provided chauffeurs.

Clinton wasn't the originator of the gas tax holiday proposal--John McCain was. Clinton embraced it and coupled it with a demand for a "windfall profits tax" on oil companies, which she knew George Bush would never sign. Whether a President Hillary Clinton would implement such a policy is doubtful, but candidate Hillary Clinton thought she had a winning issue.

Most economic experts thought the gas tax holiday was a dumb idea. Economist Dean Baker cogently explained why:

We have a fixed amount of gas entering the market, [so] the question is simply what price clears the market. In this context, if we reduce or eliminate the gas tax, the price doesn't change; the lower tax will simply allow Exxon and other oil companies to keep more profits (unless, of course, they were lying about running their refineries at capacity).

Obama opposed the gas tax holiday. But his case against it had all the hallmarks of the middle-class "goo-goo" ("good government") reformer who lectures working people about what's good for them (sort of like Hillary Clinton in a former incarnation).

The gas tax holiday would amount to only $30 per person and divert money away from the federal highway fund, Obama said. He didn't make oil company profiteering central to his opposition.

Obama never pointed out that, like all sales taxes, the federal gas tax is regressive (neither did Clinton, for that matter). It takes more money proportionately from lower-income people than from higher-income people. So it would seem that the "progressive" thing to do would be to support the gas tax holiday, while pushing for a serious effort against oil company profiteering and other policies like supporting mass transit and subsidizing workers' travel expenses.

Did supporting the gas tax holiday work for Clinton? It was hard to say on election night. With the race so close in Indiana, it's difficult to claim the issue as a deciding factor. But the fact that Obama didn't go along with the proposal tells us a lot about what we can expect from an Obama presidency.

According to NBC's Chuck Todd, the Obama camp said it thought the gas tax issue was a net win for them. Obama acted "presidential" by refusing to "pander" to working-class voters. This echoed Obama's earliest responses to the housing and foreclosure crisis, when he warned against government bailouts of homeowners who got in over their heads.

Remember, Obama is still the candidate that Wall Street and many other business sectors favor. They are investing in him today so that he will be in a position to tell workers they will have to "tighten their belts" and put aside their hopes for significant change.

Whistling "Dixie" in North Carolina

The North Carolina primary saw a road test of one of the chief Republican attack lines against Barack Obama if he wins the nomination. The state Republican Party produced a television ad using media images of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Obama, aimed at two local Democratic candidates for governor. "He's just too extreme for North Carolina," said the ad about Wright.

The explicit message-by-association was that the two candidates, both Obama endorsers, were too liberal. But the emotional subtext was the race card.

John McCain publicly repudiated the ad with boilerplate e-mail: "But we need not engage in political tactics that only seek to divide the American people." He asked the North Carolina Republicans not to run the ad. And they promptly ignored him.

But before anyone gives McCain too much credit, recall that he's on record as saying that he'll use Wright against Obama in the fall as well. For the Republicans, who have not a single Black member in their congressional delegation, this is the way they campaign.

As the Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s jettisoned their racist Dixiecrat wing and opened their ranks to Black voters and their electoral lists to Black politicians, Republicans used veiled appeals to racism and other aspects of cultural conservatism to woo conservative Democrats in the South into their tent. This was the "Southern strategy" that GOP politicians exploited to become the majority party in the South.

So McCain's condemnation of the ad--and the North Carolina Republicans' use of it anyway--is standard operating procedure. The national candidate gets credit for "taking the high road," while at the same time, he knows that his local minions will be using every bit of filth they can.

McCain should know how this works. In 2000, George Bush defeated him in the South Carolina primary using many of the same Karl Rove-designed tactics. While Bush remained above the fray, Rove's local operatives in South Carolina were spreading rumors that McCain had fathered a Black baby. When McCain confronted Bush on the garbage spread by his surrogates, Bush shrugged it off: "That's politics, John."

Today, a section of the Republicans is attempting to spread this strategy westward by targeting Latinos--the most prominent object of racial prejudice from West Texas to California--with the hope of repeating the GOP's success in the South.

But as was the case when the Dixiecrats and the Northern Democrats fell out, this appeal to nativism narrows the GOP's appeal to only the most retrograde elements in society. At the same time, this makes it more difficult for big business to get what it wants.

One final point: If McCain ends up facing Obama in the fall, you can be sure that he'll reprise every sleazy attack, including the Wright controversy, that Hillary Clinton has already tried. For the cash-strapped McCain campaign, having Clinton plow this ground is a godsend.

When George Bush Sr. looked for a similar way to devastate Michael Dukakis in 1988, he used a racist ad tying Dukakis to Willie Horton, a Black convict who was convicted for committing armed robbery and rape after having failed to return from a Dukakis-sponsored weekend furlough. Bush wasn't the first politician to use Willie Horton against Dukakis. In the Democratic primaries, Al Gore had made Horton a household name in campaigning against Dukakis.