Political Snapshot

What does Hillary want?

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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(Via Salon.)

From watching the coverage of the 2008 race, you’d think that the Democratic Party has never been down this road before — divided along racial lines, mired in a bitter personal battle, seemingly incapable of repairing the divisions in time to defeat the Republicans.

If you believe this, then you probably didn’t experience the 1994 U.S. Senate race in Virginia. For three years leading up to that race, the incumbent, Sen. Chuck Robb, and Gov. Doug Wilder, both Democrats, were embroiled in a bitter dispute. Robb staffers faced federal prosecution for having procured an illegal tape of a Wilder cellphone conversation and then later playing the tape for Washington Post reporters.

In late 1993, Wilder, the first African-American ever to be elected governor of a U.S. state, flirted with challenging Robb in the Democratic Senate primary. He backed away — then changed his mind and entered the race as an independent in 1994. Six weeks before Election Day, Robb was trailing Republican nominee Oliver North by double digits. In a brutal election year for Democrats, the seat looked lost.

Few believed that Wilder could ever be persuaded to give up his campaign, and then endorse and vigorously campaign for his longtime rival. But that’s just what happened — the Democratic Party pulled together, long-standing scores were settled, debts paid, and legacies preserved. Today, some believe that Hillary Clinton will never drop out before Denver, and others ponder what she might want in return for a rapid, graceful exit. In 1994, Robb and Wilder proved that how a campaign ends is often more important than how it is waged — and both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can learn from the way these rivals built a lasting peace. And it all began with that most underrated of campaign rituals– the post-campaign negotiation.

I had a front-row seat to this greatest of all Democratic crack-ups as Wilder’s press secretary. The candidate trailing badly in the polls on Labor Day weekend, our campaign decided that we had only two options left: keep running the same campaign, or sink Sen. Robb.

We wanted to win. We decided to treat the month of September like a “voteless primary”; less charitable pundits might say it was an intra-party divide and conquer. We ignored Ollie North and focused our fire on Robb alone — attacking him from the left in hopes of passing him in the polls and then driving Democrats toward Wilder in the final month as the best Democratic hope of holding the seat.

In the first week of September, Wilder caught a break in a debate when Robb made an astounding gaffe — promising to take food out of the mouths of widows and orphans if that would help balance the federal budget. What followed was a solid week of good press for Wilder as he became the new champion of Virginia’s poor huddled masses. And then, a new round of polls came out, and the news was universally bad. A Mason-Dixon poll showing Wilder slipping to fourth place, far behind North, and even behind independent Marshall Coleman, was our Indiana. It was obvious that Wilder’s campaign was over.

Full story here.