Year of Change 2008: It’s Me or No One

So what strategy is Hillary Clinton following these days? Is she trying to create a win-win situation, a scenario in which she simply cannot lose, regardless of what actually happens?

There’s two possible options: She wins the nomination of the Democratic Party. Actually, she still has a chance. In Pennsylvania, where the next large primary will take place, she is relatively far ahead of Barack Obama in the polls. And many super delegates remain undecided and could therefore possibly decide in her favor. Clinton’s campaign manager Harold Ickes is never tired of ratcheting up the pressure by reminding the super delegates of how Obama’s relationship with his former – and radical – pastor and the pastor’s “unpatriotic” and “hate-mongering” statements about whites have hurt him. The result: Obama loses the fight against John McCain.

The second option: Through this long drawn-out internal party battle, Clinton has trodden the Democrats to such a degree that McCain wins the race in November. Because he will be the oldest president in history when he enters office at the age of 72, he would be in a relatively untenable position to run again in 2012. Hillary Clinton would just be 65 – and the race would again be open for her.

But what was she thinking recently, repeatedly “misspeaking” with her tale of surviving a sharpshooter’s attack in Bosnia in 1996? It couldn’t just be her reported sleep deficit, which is what she later claimed. The archive footage broadcast continually on TV showed without question how welcoming a reception it really was, with children gathered around to greet her followed by a convivial chorus of song. Despite this, she obstinately kept to her version of the story. As a United Nations official commented on this scandal in one letter to the editor, the whole point was that the war had ended three months before Clinton’s visit – with daughter Chelsea – and the scheduled trip was to celebrate after the hard-fought negotiations for peace. You would therefore think that this discrepancy between speech and reality would put into question her frequently invoked “experience” und “readiness” for office.

In a speech in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton insisted that she is like boxer Rocky Balboa (a role played by Sylvester Stallone in the film “Rocky”), stating “I never give up.”

A Democratic Party official compared the situation to another athlete: Clinton, he said, is acting like frustrated professional ice skater Tonya Harding, who hired a man to smash the kneecap of her rival in 1994. In other words: If I can’t win, then no one can.