And the rightful winner is...

Les Payne

May 12, 2008

With math, by-laws and the democratic process favoring her opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign options appear to be either attempting an intra-party coup d'etat or playing what in Alabama used to be called the "cracker card."

The coup attempt would be staged by Clinton supporters at the party's Rules and By-Laws Committee meeting to decide the fate of the Michigan and Florida primaries, on May 31. The senator and her husband, the titular head of the Democratic Party, agreed earlier to void results of the two primaries when it appeared favorable to her. Surprisingly, the official tally now favors Sen. Barack Obama by 174 delegates and some 800,000 votes.

Thus, the duo seeks to grab power by overturning the rules or disregarding them outright.

"Count the votes," her supporters yelled Tuesday night as Clinton tried to put a smiley face on the grim news of her crushing 14-point defeat in North Carolina and her narrow win in Indiana.

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"Thanks to you, it's full-speed ahead and on to the White House," Clinton said in Indiana. The rallying cry, even as her stoic husband and stoned-faced daughter looked on, seemed eerily out of synch with reality.

The Clintons' reaction to this latest adversity can be understood only when one considers the family's dysfunctional uniqueness. Outsiders cannot know, and should not care, about the coping mechanism of the Clintons, who endured White House sex scandals, global humiliation, and the second presidential impeachment in U.S. history. However, it is no longer in doubt that the force that brought 'em through it all together was Mother Hillary.

Has the ex-president's 8-year maneuvering as party leader - and crazed behavior on the stump - been an attempt to reward his family with the White House for the pain and suffering he's caused them?

Motive aside, this Clinton plan to rotate back into the White House - if not this year, then possibly 2012 - is the stuff of backwater southern states. It should be unthinkable for a self-respecting technological nation of 300 million citizens, some of whom are gifted, many of whom are wise. In Alabama, where I was born, George C. Wallace maneuvered his wife, Lurleen, into the state house when the law forbad him to succeed himself in 1966. The bold circumvention, not uncommon in the South, was derided as "Cracker politics" by Negroes who were largely denied the vote.

A variation of this maneuver seems to have wormed into the presidential campaign tactics of the wife of the former Arkansas governor.

Outflanked at every turn, Clinton grasps at the straw of the lily-white vote, bragging that they will reject Obama by reason of melanin. "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she told USA Today, citing an Associated Press story claiming that Obama's strength among "white Americans, is weakening again" and that "whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

The New York senator rests her hope in West Virginia and Kentucky, and with Michigan and Florida twisted her way, who knows, she may see a clear shot at the nomination. She has indeed spent quality time with the "blue collar" white folks, knocking back boilermakers, cackling in the honky-tonks, and talking engine torque out on the track. Her campaign mingling with the NASCAR crowd recalls nothing so much as another apparent winning race by another African-American.

At a 1963 Grand National race in Jacksonsville, Fla., Wendell Scott drove the race of his life and shocked opponents and judges. The Negro crossed the finish line of the 200-lap NASCAR track but didn't get the checkered flag. Determined, he finished two more laps, still ahead of his white challenger, Buck Baker.

To preserve race pride and spare the bottle-blonde race queen the duty of kissing a Negro winner, NASCAR judges failed to give Scott his award that day - despite his two-lap victory!

Could this be the last hope for Sen. Clinton's June surprise?

I dunno.