How Populist Pandering Sank Hillary Clinton

Our long national Wrightmare is finally over.

With his unexpectedly impressive win in North Carolina and equally unexpected draw in Indiana last night, Barack Obama has successfully withstood a substance-less campaign of defamation from the Clintonites and their allies in the GOP to put to rest any lingering unreasonable doubt over the outcome of the Democratic primary campaign. The Clintonites are still making a show of staying in the race, but they've clearly been sapped of the defiant élan of the last few months, have tellingly retired their character assassinations against Senator Obama, and are effectively resigned to watching their superdelegate and high-level surrogate support leak like a sieve.

So what did the zombie campaign do to finally get its brain killed? Somehow, it managed to disprove one of Barnum's laws, and went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. (That is, literally went broke; last month Hillary Clinton loaned her campaign $6.4 million, on top of the at least $5 million she's already lent herself.) Needless to say, this is encouraging news not only for Obama supporters, but all Americans. Here's how it happened.

The Clintonites, whose respect for middle America consists entirely in buying every single crude stereotype about it, simply assumed that the white working class is a) the only part of the electorate that matters and b) monolithically slack-jawed, liver-damaged, unemployed, resentful, paranoid, and gullible. Consequently, they premised their Indiana and North Carolina primary campaigns on the Nigerian 419 gas tax scam, blowing up either OPEC or the moon, the immolation of 72 million innocent Iranians in a nuclear holocaust, leveling the playing field in the housing market by preventing anyone from buying a house for years to come, and generally making sure never to listen to experts just in case they might once in a blue moon be right about their field of expertise. (Under a Hillary Clinton administration, Megan McArdle writes, "no one has to worry about oil or houses, because there won't be any to worry about. That's just the kind of thoughtful, caring politician she is.")

And sure, the Clinton platform may in reality have been what quote-unquote experts describe as "fucking retarded." But as salt of the earth pundits like Joe Scarborough explained, working-class whites just want a bit of help with their bills and aren't interested in lectures from eggheads. And as spokesmen for the last redoubts of Clinton backers further noted, Obama's skepticism about the appreciation working-class people would show to a rich woman offering them a piddling bribe bespeaks a profound elitism and arrogance sure to turn off blue collar voters.

But then a funny thing happened. In Ohio, Obama won 34 percent of the white vote and 42 percent of voters making under $50,000 annually. In Pennsylvania, those numbers were 37 percent and 46 percent, respectively. And in Indiana, 40 percent and 50 percent. In other words, through two months of relentless and increasingly absurd populist pandering and racebaiting, over three primaries in three bordering, demographically similar rust-belt states which one would intuitively expect to be susceptible to the Clinton tactics, Obama consistently if slowly improved his performance among white voters and working-class voters. The Clinton campaign's descent into surrealist performance art bought them less than nothing.

Meanwhile, Obama's share of the college-educated vote, which dipped slightly in Pennsylvania thanks in part to the strength of the Ed Rendell machine, bounced back with a vengeance last night. It seems people who've studied a bit of economics don't take well to being told that up is down; nor, in all likelihood, are they wild about being being called "Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle" while a presidential candidate looks on smilingly.

So apparently, in 2008, having the audacity to hope that Americans — even white working-class Americans — aren't drooling simians can pay off in the end.