Francisco Franco and the 2008 Campaign

Even some of Sen. Hillary Clinton's most devoted supporters now privately concede the inevitability of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's winning the Democratic presidential nomination. One hint to understanding the mindset of candidate Clinton and her devoted loyalists (the ones who refuse to acknowledge the nonexistence of any semi-plausible path to the nomination) may be found in a story popular in Spain as that country's then-aging dictator lingered in critical condition.

The year was 1975, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the ruthless strongman who with an iron hand had ruled Spain for four decades, lay on his deathbed. The joke then popular in Barcelona went like this:

First Spaniard: "There is good news, and there is bad news."

Second Spaniard: "Tell me the good news first and then the bad news."

First Spaniard: "The good news is that Franco is dead. … The bad news is that you have to tell him!"

There are, you may have noticed, very few Clintonistas volunteering to tell Hillary that her 2008 campaign is dead.

Understandably, the Obama campaign is turning much of its attention to the general election contest against Republican John McCain. But it would be a serious mistake for Obama to ignore the grave warnings to his prospects found in the Kentucky primary results. While Sen. Clinton's dominance among white, older, non-college-educated, working-class and lower-income voters had already been recognized, in Kentucky the New York senator also captured thumping majorities among the state's liberals, its youngest voters, its most-educated voters and its most affluent voters.

What ought to set off alarm bells for Obama and all Democrats working to win the White House is not simply the across-the-board demographic sweep by Clinton, but instead the eagerness of so many Obama backers to dismiss these returns by attributing their candidate's rejection to the irredeemable "racism" of the voters in the Democratic presidential primary.

This is the most dangerous rationalization for political defeat.

I call this excuse "Blame the Customer." We absolve our campaign and our candidate of all responsibility for losing by simply decreeing that the voters are stupid or bigoted or terminally selfish.

There is a fatal flaw in this explanation. In the United States, we have only two major parties. If you brand more than half of the electorate as ethical eunuchs and moral defectives, you probably won't on a regular basis win a majority of the votes.

When I criticized Obama's failure to campaign extensively among white, working-class voters in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky, I read scores of critical e-mails chastising me for failing to admit that it was only white racism that had caused Clinton to win and Obama to lose. I would ask my correspondents what their game plan is for the fall campaign. Is it to campaign only among "good" white votes in places like Minnesota, Oregon, Iowa and Wisconsin?

First, the campaign and the candidate must reject totally any "Blame the Customer" excuses for recent defeats. Is racism still a problem with some voters? You bet it is. But I refuse to accept that there's an epidemic of hate infecting more than half the population.

Let's be blunt. It's a lot more fun for the candidate and his campaign to address a friendly crowd of 75,000 admirers along the Portland waterfront than it is to try to reach a hundred skeptical blue-collar voters at a VFW post.

What the candidate has to tell the doubters in the union hall with specifics is: "You may not be for me, but I want you to know this: I have always been for you. And I always will be for you."

Unless these voters can feel before November that Obama's values are their values and that they can be safe with Obama as president, then you can start buying John McCain stock. That's the lesson from Kentucky.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 MARK SHIELDS