By Ardain ismaCSMS Magazine Staff WriterNew AnalysisDemocratic Party candidate, Hillary Clinton, will resort to any form of manipulation in order to clinch the Party nomination. Watching the primary election process, one has the impression that he is being watching an old Daniel Boone movie, or a Wild, Wild West scenario that its outcome is far from being predictable. There is no doubt that Mrs. Clinton is one of the most polarized figures in modern US politic. Those who like her, do so with a passion. Those who hate her also do so with an irreverent passion. But she has always held her ground, her moral high ground—until now.            Since the New Hampshire primary, when she had to pleurenicher like a baby to win voters’ sympathy to her vexing tactics at degrading her harsh rival Barack Obama to her new ploy aimed at disarming Obama’s voters on the premise that she and Obama will be the Democratic ticket in November, one gets the since that somehow the devil has bewitched her mind.            A leader must portray courage, not weakness—especially not begging for sympathy. Until last week, when she won Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island, Mrs. Clinton had spent 11 contests without winning a single one, fueling expectations that her campaign was doomed if she didn’t win Ohio and Texas. Obama, who came from behind, emerged as the clear frontrunner with more than 100 delegates over Clinton—a lead that most analysts predict will be almost impossible to overcome.Last Saturday, she was once again the loser in Wyoming Caucuses and she is expected to lose in Mississippi on Tuesday. But yet, this does not stop her from circulating the idea that Obama can join her in the ticket as her running mate. This idea, which was a rumor at first, received legitimacy on Saturday in Mississippi when Bill Clinton made it public. “A Clinton-Obama ticket will be unstoppable. He will win the young voters and the more affluent democrats and she will win the blue collar voters from the industrial states,” he suggested before a group of Hillary supporters. Bill Clinton, who once admitted that he didn’t think to he’d live to see a black president at the White House, seems be to at a collision course with history. Perhaps he thinks this assertion still stands.Obama himself has emphatically rejected the idea, saying that he is “running for president, not for vice president.” There is a fear within the Obama camp that Hillary is planning a preemptive strike, attempting to forego the outcome by trying to instill into voters’ minds that the Illinois senator is young, too young to assume the highest office of the land. “I don’t know how somebody who is in second place is offering the vice presidency to the person who is first place,” the Illinois senator said before a cheering crowd of about 2,000, Miss on Monday. Then he went on to say that “I don’t want anybody here thinking that somehow, ‘Well, you know, maybe I can get both.’ Don’t think that way. You have to make a choice in this election.”Out of the 45 contests held so far in this primary season, Obama won 28, Clinton 17. And according to the latest associated Press account, Obama leads Clinton 1,579 to 1,473.So where is the logic behind this latest Clinton maneuvering? It is designed to belittled Obama, which falls in line with the Clinton strategy—a strategy made public on January 19^th in South Carolina, when Bill Clinton, trying to diminish Hillary’s crushing defeat by suggesting that Obama’s win was nothing serious for Jessie Jackson carried the State when he ran for president in 1988. Bill Clinton remarks, which aimed at portraying Obama as a fringe candidate, infuriated many African American leaders, but also humiliated and forced underground many others who until then continued to publicly support Clinton.

Clinton-Obama: not a likely scenario

 In all intellectual probity, it is hard to foresee a political marriage with the two ambitious candidates. Although the media continues to say otherwise, Clinton and Obama would not hold a workable relationship in a Democratic White House. As a VP, Obama would most likely be marginalized since Bill Clinton would be the real player, running the show from behind. “Many political activists discounted the notion all along. They noted that the two senators lack a warm relationship and, more important, that Obama would be ill-served by hinting he might accept the vice presidential slot when he holds the lead in delegates and hopes to win the presidential nomination,” confirmed Associated press in an article titled Obama ridicules the notion of VP slot. The same sentiment was echoed on ABC’s good Morning America this morning by Massachusetts’s senator John Cary.             Hillary’s victories on march 4^th, which came after a long and humiliating month of defeats, were by all account a political boost needed to revive the New York senator political near-death experience. And what the media is now calling “the comeback kid” was none other than an already factored-in scenario, for months leading up to the March 4^th primaries, polls showed that Hillary held a 20-point lead over Obama in both Texas and Ohio. If there was anything new was that in 4 weeks, Clinton watched in horror her leads evaporated like dust in the wind, and she could not have won without political dirty tricks that many energized young voters supporting Obama staunchly reject. 

Reviving Florida and Michigan: the last card

 In the effort to win at all cost, Hillary’s strategy is two-pronged: Down-playing Obama’s candidacy, and if that does work, pressing for honoring Florida and Michigan delegates, which were originally rejected to punish the Sates for pushing their primaries too early in contradiction to the Democratic Party rules. This idea seems to be getting momentum by the day. When former governor Howard Dean, the Party chairman, said that there is no money to do so, New Jersey Governor steps in to offer to raise money for the effort. The Clinton supporters are hard at work to make this scenario a reality, their only chance they believe they have at topping Obama in the delegates’ count.            Will the Obama camp sign on to that? It is any one guest. Until now, Obama remains coy to the idea, and so to all the other boiling issues that sharpen the shallow difference between Obama and Clinton. This divergence, which threatens to paralyze the party and exposes all the drawbacks that exist in a bourgeois democracy, is poised to surface right into the open down in the convention floor in August when the Democrats hold their convention. But the divergence is by no means strategic. Both candidates have pledged to uphold the status quo, and both are set out to make history no matter who wins the nomination.Note: Pleurenicher is a French word, which means cry for merci.Also see Is Barack Obama unstoppable after his stunning victory in Iowa last week?   The Obama campaign plunges deeper into the defensive after the Nevada lost last SaturdayDr. Ardain Isma teaches Cross-Cultural Studies at Nova Southeastern University. He is the publisher of CSMS Magazine. He is also a novelist. He may be reached at publisher@csmsmagazine.org