Aaron Keith Harris
2008-02-15 08:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

Hillary Clinton and her camp are probably feeling funny this week. Their posture in news interviews since being clobbered by Barack Obama in Tuesday’s Maryland, Virginia and District of Columbia primaries is confident. But their eyes are open a little too wide, their words a little too sure.

It’s the same feeling Bill Belichick and his Patriots got sometime in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl. This guy can’t really beat us, can he?

Clinton knows she is in trouble, especially among younger, more activist party members, so expect her to bear sharply to the left.

She’s already started, by repeating more often her promise to deliver “universal health care,” instead of using more moderate-friendly phrases like “reforming health care” or “insuring the uninsured.”

But reminding her party of her legendary health care defeat, which many of them see as a noble failure, will probably not work with the voters she scrambles to attract. In elections, candidates usually don’t win credit for causes championed 15 years ago — especially when they, like Clinton, fail more recent liberal litmus tests. For Clinton, that mistake was voting for the then-popular Iraq war in an attempt to distance herself from congressional liberals.

If not for Barack Obama, she might have been successful. His stance against the war made him a media sensation.

He’s always been the most likable Democrat in the race, but that’s a low hurdle to clear when Clinton and John Edwards are the other choices. Who would you rather go on a road trip with? Or have as a boss? I’d pick Barry from Chicago, too.

But that still doesn’t explain his status as a “rock star,” a phrase the media love to repeat.

Fox News pollster Frank Luntz’s live chats with focus groups of Republican and Democratic voters are revealing. When he asks those supporting, or leaning toward, Obama to name one of his accomplishments or qualifications, they can’t come up with anything except blank stares or Obamaspeak about hope, optimism or the like. Most fans of musicians can at least name a few songs or an album, something substantive, that attracts them to the person.

This is the Chauncey Gardiner effect. In the superb 1979 film “Being There,” Peter Sellers plays Chance, a simpleminded gardener at a huge estate thrust into the real word after his employer dies.

He ends up meeting another rich man, who is also a friend of the president, and because Chance is well-dressed and speaks in simple though empty phrases, the powerful elite project onto him their desire for a wise man to solve all their problems.

Chauncey never gave anyone reason to question the faith they put in him, and so far neither has Obama. And why should he? Let Clinton raise her voice and talk policy all she wants; none of her punches are landing.

Obama’s main task at this point should be to brush up on his Machiavelli. If any campaign can, shall we say, persuade a bunch of prominent Democrats to trump the popular vote at the convention, it is Clinton’s.

Republican front-runner John McCain has a different problem. He has lots of well-defined positions, but they do not align with those of the conservative voters who made possible every national electoral success for Republicans since Nixon in 1968.

Some hopeful Republicans think Mike Huckabee’s quixotically prolonged run will pull McCain back toward the mainstream of his party. But why should it?

McCain treasures the media-bestowed “maverick” label for his work restricting political speech, demonizing drug companies, crusading for anti-global warming regulations and pushing a bill to give amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.

So while Democrats are happy with a candidate who says almost nothing, conservative Republicans are left with no choice at all.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.