But if we recognize that, we must also recognize what we have in Hillary Clinton: a once-in-a-generation political pugilist who, like her much smoother adversary, is amazingly capable of turning weakness into strength. Pitted against physical beauty and inspirational rhetoric, Hillary made herself the champion of everything stylistically ordinary, superficially unimpressive and ignored. And while her opponent won all the attention and admiration, all the teen-idol gushings of the beautiful people, she went for something deeper — resentment at the lack of those same things. She took an opponent who was relentless in his attempts to remain genial, positive and unifying, and managed to turn him into a divisive villain, a symbol representing every oversexed winner who ever had it too easy at the pimply kid’s expense.
It’s brilliant strategy, and it’s working so well that Hillary now has her crowds hurling catcalls at the mere mention of anything Obama. Moreover, she’s inspired such profound loyalty that her supporters no longer give a shit at all how they win, as long as they do. Like O.J. apologists who became overnight skeptics of DNA evidence, Clinton backers don’t see anything wrong with winning the nomination through a brokered convention, despite being behind in the popular vote and the delegate count. “Why not?” says Don Dileo, a union organizer who worked for Hillary in Pennsylvania. “That’s the system of government we have, right?”
Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of Obama crazies, either — only on that side, the fanaticism is more of the throw-your-panties-onstage craze for the cool cool thing last seen swirling around the Beatles or Elvis or Shaun Cassidy. Just as the majority of the Hillary supporters I’ve talked to lately don’t give a damn about her policy positions, so too do many Obama fans hide behind vague terms like “I like his integrity” or “He changes the paradigm.” It’s the same mindless devotion as the Hillary camp’s “I won’t back down!” Only it seems painfully personal in one case, intellectually earnest (almost comically so) in the other.
And here’s the thing. Whereas the Clinton rallies seem to embrace the combative nature of this contest, in the Obama camp one frequently finds people who are deeply troubled by it. “He’s been a complete gentleman,” says Amala Lane, an Obama volunteer from New York who came down to Pennsylvania for the primary. “This is exactly what Obama is trying to get us beyond: this blue-state/red-state thing.”
Listening to Lane — a soft-spoken, white, college-educated intellectual who worked as a teacher overseas — you can see exactly where Obama has gone wrong. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, Obama polled well among people exactly like this: liberals and college graduates. In the Full Metal Jacket paradigm, faggots and sailors. Earlier in the campaign, the Obama camp was so busy stewing over Bill Clinton’s comparison of Obama’s South Carolina win to Jesse Jackson’s and worrying about being painted as a “black candidate” that they forgot to worry about being painted as something even worse, in American political terms: the candidate of liberal intellectuals.
With all his verbose deflections of Hillary’s attacks and unconcealed annoyance over silly nonissues like his failure to wear a flag lapel pin, Obama inadvertently painted himself into a corner as a know-it-all, a pointy-head who would rather yammer in polysyllables and talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than wear the fucking American flag on his chest — as Hillary, meanwhile, was promising to “obliterate” Iran and in the process roping in hordes of nondescript suburbanites who’ll crawl through the mud for “Madam President” while marching to classic rock tunes like the “Horst Wessel Song.” Clinton’s genius was in seeing that it was possible to play the liberal/intellectual-baiting game not only with Republicans but with Democrats — and that by forcing her opponent to take the high road, she could scour the fish-rich waters of the low road.
The result has been an epic clash, a war of cultural types that has nothing whatsoever to do with issues and everything to do with self-image. It’s become a pitched fight between the fucked-over suburban little guy and the vilified intellectual, two groups that for years have felt put upon and dispossessed, for different reasons. The fact that their respective champions are identical superstar U.S. senators/multimillionaires makes the bitter hatred this schism is inspiring absurd, but it doesn’t make it any less real. Or likely to end anytime soon.