Donna live in New Orleans

This week I attended a conference in New Orleans and the keynote speaker was Donna Brazile, the Democratic consultant and CNN commentator. She gave an entertaining talk. She was born and raised in New Orleans, and she welcomed us and expressed her appreciation that we had picked her hometown, still struggling to recover from the ruin of Katrina. Her talk only now and then touched on civic engagement, the topic publicized in the conference program. At the end of her talk, instead of the usual Q and A, where one might expect questions about the talk, or requests for clarifying comments, several people stepped up to the microphones in the audience to ask questions about the endless Democratic primary schedule. As one might expect, several women stepped forward to offer, in place of actual questions, long, rambling defenses of Hillary. One woman, evidently realizing that protocol expects that Qs will be asked during Q and A, wrapped up her weepy monologue about Hillary by asking: Don't you think the media has been horrible to Hillary? Brazile's answer was long, angry, and illuminating. She began by saying that Hillary's problems are her own making, they aren't the product of a media conspiracy or boys beating up on the only girl with the nerve to crash their party. She said Hillary is better than her campaign. But her campiagn has been awful. Brazile couldn't believe that Hillary would assemble a campaign that assumed she'd lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday, and have NO IDEA WHAT TO DO ON FEBRUARY 6. She marveled at a campaign that would spend millions on political consultants, but not spend money for on-the-ground operations. The result, she implied, is a campaign that had NO CHOICE BUT TO ATTEMPT TO TAKE DOWN OBAMA, REGARDLESS OF THE DAMAGE IT WOULD DO TO THE PARTY. Brazile said she defended Hillary's decision to continue after the long slide that followed Super Tuesday, but she implied she might have thought differently if she knew Hillary's campaign was going to go after Obama with both barrels.

Brazile, who is a super-delegate, said, though, that she isn't going to watch while Hillary fights all the way to the convention. She said she is going to get on the phone on June 4, the day after Montana and South Dakota vote, and she is going to call Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, and she is going to say: This has to end now. That still leaves 2 months for the Clinton campaign to thoroughly contaminate the party and the process with their deplorable tactics and personal attacks. On June 4, the surviving candidate--which will be, as predicted by almost every objective observer, Barack Obama--will find himself trying to rally a demoralized, divided party, fatigued by months of brutal hand-to-hand combat, less willing (or less able) to give money for the general election race against McCain. Maureen Dowd wrote a column this week that laid out a scenario where Hillary, convinced she can't win this year, has decided to damage Obama so badly he can't win against McCain. Then Hillary will return in 2012 and take the presidency from McCain, or his VP if the 71 year-old McCain decides not to seek reelection. The scenerio made me think of Primary Colors, the Mike Nichols film, from the novel by Joe Klein. The novel was widely known to have been based on the Clintons, and the movie makes this as clear as can be, with John Travolta and Emma Thompson playing fictionalized versions of Bill and Hillary. In the movie, Susan and Jack Stanton (that is, Hillary and Bill) have the chance to win the Democratic party's nomination by using radioactive dirt against their primary opponent (they learn he used cocaine in the past and had some homosexual encounters). Watching the movie again recently I thought: Klein and Nichols had it right. Here, without that toxic-grade personal dirt to use, they have decided: if we can't bring Obama down, let's make sure he can't win, then we can win 4 years from now.

While traveling I had the chance to read the Wall Street Journal, something I never do unless someone gives me the paper (thanks Sheraton!). I never agree with their editorials, which are always campaigning for bigger tax breaks for the richest of the rich, and propose market-based solutions for everything. But on Friday I found myself saying: "Fuck yeah! That's right!"I can't link to the editorial, because the Journal makes you pay to look at their online edition. But here's the part that caught my eye. Hillary dragged Joe and Valerie Wilson to Philadelphia to campaign for her. The goal was to shine-up her foreign policy credentials and further distance herself from her vote authorizing the Iraq war. The editorial quotes Wilson saying: "Senator Clinton's position, stated in her floor speech, was in favor of allowing the United Nations weapons inspectors to complete their mission and to build a broad international coalition. Bush rejected her path." Wait. That's. A. Lie. Anyone who has read Hillary's floor speech, as I pointed out about a month ago, knows that she sided with Bush, employing all of the same tactics he did to inspire fear among the American people and undermine the United Nations. The Journal points this out: "This is the same Senator Clinton who spoke extensively of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his WMD, who endorsed the invasion as a way to remove that threat, whose husband endorsed the invasion, and who supported the war for years afterward."