"They have come to regard each other bitterly, scornfully, as unfit to lead their party against the Republicans in the fall."

"[A]nyone who has spent time in close quarters with these two cats already understood" that, writes New York Magazine's John Hellemann on Clinton and Obama:

Maybe it was inevitable that the campaign—this historic rumble between the first credible female and African-American aspirants to the highest office in the land—would end up here, but until quite recently, it didn’t seem that way. For one full year, we were treated instead to a mutually self-serving (or self-defeating) narrative, dominated by prettied-up personas and tissue-thin false dichotomies: change versus experience, novelty versus familiarity, idealism versus pragmatism. Presidential campaigns are always highly scripted affairs, of course. But the endless wonder of them is that eventually, invariably, the story line goes careering off the rails, veering into more visceral and personal territory—in the process revealing much about the candidates, the country, and even ourselves.

That opener creates expectations the article can't quite fulfill, but Hellemann has been close to operatives of both campaigns, and has talked privately with Clinton herself.  Nothing blazingly new is revealed, but there are a lot of telling details.

• Hillary's team definitely sees the world in terms of combat, not reconciliation.  In response to concerns that Obama is more electable because he can draw independents and even Republicans, they say Obama has a "glass jaw" and that if he's the candidate in November, "the Republicans will carve him up like a piece of processed lunch meat."
• Obama's chief political operative David Axelrod has described the candidate as "too normal to run for president" -- which of course is just the pitch they're trying to make, playing on our doomed longing to find, at last, the politician who is . . . not a politician.

Hellemann concludes that the real divide here is between "hard-eyed realism" and romanticism -- "the thrill and terror of letting yourself dream again."  Clinton's prediction of a vicious November fight will, of course, be a self-fulfilling prophecy if she's the candidate.  The Clintons are one side of the past two decades' vicious polarization.  They can't conceive of transcending it, only of fighting more viciously and lethally than the other side.  They predict that as much as Republicans may feel Obama's attraction (and they've been candid about it), for just that reason they will feel obligated to eviscerate him -- and will find it easy to do.  That is, even if the electorate is repulsed by their stop-at-nothing tactics, they will succeed in sowing just enough doubt about Obama's inexperience, his history of hard-left liberalism (which I for one am convinced he's genuinely moving away from), and even his race.

Cross-posted at PoliGazette.

H/T:  RealClearPolitics.

Comments

[Clark http://clarkspicks.com]

This is the dilemma, but we know that the Republican campaign machine will attempt to eviscerate the Democratic nominee, whoever that turns out to be. Hillary C. is the most vulnerable, but perhaps the most able to defend herself, having a sixteen year history of vicious Republican attacks behind her already.

[amba]

Yes! And isn't that a vicious cycle!

[PatHMV]

Those darn Republicans! Thank goodness good Democrats like the Clintons never try to make nasty political attacks!

[Donna B.]

Why do you think Obama is genuinely moving away from his hard-left liberalism? I'm really curious, I haven't seen it.

[amba]

For one thing, he has a hawkish streak (though it has been disappointing to see him dutifully pandering to the base on the war). For another, he acknowledges the roles of faith, family, and personal responsibility in dealing with social pathology; it isn't all government programs. Third, he talks about gathering good ideas from all parts of the ideological spectrum. For him to say anything at all positive about Ronald Reagan was a leap over the heads of primary voters to the general population.

[James Stanhope]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this issue, "Republican attacks" on the Democratic nominee, even though they're inevitable, will not change the outcome of this election. The Republican nominee, whether he likes it or not, will be running on the Republican record of the last eight years. Since, in 2008, voters want different policies and not merely different personalities, Republican attacks will backfire unless the Republican nominee can also offer a credible alternative to the policies of the past eight years. Since, with the exception of Huckabee and Ron Paul, the Republican candidates have mostly endorsed Bush's policies of tax cuts and war, no Republican will be elected unless he unexpectedly offers a program radically different from Bush's. Otherwise the Republican attack strategy will be counterproductive for Republicans, all the more because voters have come to expect a Republican style of discourse that is both disingenuous and even openly cynical, and voters no longer buy it -- and I'm speaking as a conservative Republican. Democrats don't have to worry about Obama's "glass jaw" because Republicans have already done themselves in, unless they change radically before November 2008.

[Ron]

I wonder if Obama's campaign is hitting the same emotional chords vis-a-vis Bush as Carter's did with Nixon. That is to say, the need to flee from an ugly situation and the desire for some form of idealism. This doesn't necessarily make for a good candidate however...

[wj]

Ron, actually it does make a good candidate.

Which is not to say that it makes a good President afterwards. Carter was a good candidate. And I personally think he is one of our better ex-Presidents (if not up to Hoover). But as President, he was mediocre at best.

[amba]

Funny, because I think it's near the end of that New York Mag article that it says, "Obama could be our next JFK . . . or our next Jimmy Carter."