Politics and Punditry: The losing candidate’s public pain

To mask the painfully public and publicly painful experience of losing a presidential campaign, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., turned to humor to mask his hurt: “Frankly, I don’t mind not being president ... I just mind that somebody else is.”

Unless one has actually run for president — and failed — it is all but impossible to grasp the life-altering permanence of that loss.

The story is told about former Vice President Walter “Fritz” Mondale, the defeated 1984 Democratic nominee, running into George McGovern, the defeated 1972 Democratic nominee, a couple of years after Mondale had lost to Ronald Reagan. Mondale reportedly asked McGovern, “Tell me, George, when does it stop hurting?” To which McGovern answered, “I’ll let you know, Fritz, I’ll let you know.”

Barring an act of God or of political suicide, Barack Obama will be the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee. And Hillary Clinton will not. For Sen. Clinton — whether or not she has accepted this reality -- this means the implosion of all her expectations, the shattering of her dream.

She desperately needs time and space, which the Obama campaign, resisting the temptation to take a “victory lap,” appears committed to giving her. The theme song for every winning campaign’s approach toward each losing candidate ought to be Aretha Franklin’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”

Texas and Washington Democratic wise man Bob Strauss understood well the suffering of the losing candidate: “It takes a lot of guts to stick your neck out and run for any public office. But the only thing that’s tougher than announcing for office is withdrawing from a race, because when you drop out, you are saying that you are quitting and that you’re beaten.”

But Clinton and her campaign must understand fully that respect is reciprocal. As she winds down her effort, she and her lieutenants must cease and desist from attacking Obama in language that can only be helpful to the Republicans in the general election.

No more baseless “Obama cannot win in November” pronouncements from Clinton’s former chief strategist, Mark Penn, and no more unsubstantiated warnings about an “October surprise” involving the all-but-certain Democratic standard-bearer from Harold Ickes, longtime Clinton adviser and intimate.

Hillary Clinton, herself, if she wants to leave this race with dignity, must clean up her own act immediately. That means she can make her own positive case for her own candidacy, and she is more welcome to make the case against the record of the George W. Bush administration and the strong and crucial support given to the lame-duck Republican president by Arizona Sen. John McCain.

But for Clinton, that means she must bite her tongue and stop suggesting that Obama cannot win support from white voters in November, as when she insisted to Kathy Kiely and Jill Lawrence of USA Today “how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again and how whites in both states (Indiana and North Carolina) who had not completed college were supporting me.”

While it is true that Clinton has recently carried by substantial margins white voters in these two states plus Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, she deliberately ignores the facts that Obama won ?— and she lost — white voters in Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Vermont.

What are these white voters in these states to Clinton and her campaign? Chopped liver?

If Hillary Clinton wants to be treated with respect and consideration for her feelings as she withdraws from the contest, she must first understand that respect, consideration — and loyalty— are a two-way street.

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

Distributed By Creators Syndicate Inc. © 2008 Mark Shields