Random candidates
Long-ago choices -- and chance -- helped forge the Clinton-Obama rivalry.
Now that the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has moved into close-quarters combat for delegates, analysts will search for the cunning strategies or the mistakes that win or lose elections. But when I look at the race, I am reminded of the role played by chance and unforeseen consequences.
I spent the 1998 election night at the headquarters of the Cook County Central Committee (to specify Democratic in Chicago is superfluous). That famous "smoke-filled room" had been defogged by no-smoking building rules, leaving men and women to suck on mints and mutter into cellphones as they watched the returns come in.
The incumbent Democratic U.S. senator, Carol Moseley Braun, was losing. Democrats across the country had managed to hold on to their edge in the Senate despite -- or perhaps because of -- the bitter inquisition into President Clinton's high jinks with a White House intern. But many Illinois Democrats found it harder to defend Moseley Braun against alleged corruption charges. Some committee members told me they had been eager to find a candidate to run against the senator in the primary. But open opposition was risky. They didn't want it to look as if the Democratic Party would scuttle a figure from history -- her election as the first African American woman in the Senate had been a source of pride for the state.
They mentioned the names of several African American officeholders who had been carefully contacted to be potential candidates. But none had leaped at the chance to run against someone whose portrait hung in school classrooms. No one mentioned the name of Barack Obama.
Then someone said that someone had called Hillary Rodham Clinton. Reports that she was interested in running for the U.S. Senate somewhere had first appeared in 1997. But committee members said that she had politely declined even a tickle of interest from her old home state. We can only speculate why. After all, 1998 abounded with investigations (Paula! Troopergate! Monica!) into President Clinton's behavior. Hillary Clinton would have had personal and political reasons to stay close to her husband and daughter in the White House. She might have been sick of politics. She might have dreamed of starting a fresh life in New York. But she might also have wanted to avoid beginning her electoral career running against an important symbol in African American and women's history.
