We put too much stock in the Oedipal theory of history, my late polymath friend Jim Chapin, the most generous of mentors to historians and journalists, used to argue. More common than children overthrowing their parents, Chapin said, was parents stamping out their children's revolts. More revolutions fail than succeed. Chapin called this the Cronus theory, after the Titan in Greek mythology who, on hearing that one of his children would overthrow him, swallowed them whole (except, unfortunately for Cronus, Zeus, who, sure enough, overthrew him).
In recent weeks, the specter of Cronus has haunted Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. It has appeared in two forms -- the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and, counting two as one, Hillary and Bill Clinton. On Tuesday, Obama handily dispatched Wright. How exactly he will dispatch the Clintons -- and whether they will persist in transforming themselves into their party's two-headed Cronus -- remains to be seen.
With his appearance at the National Press Club last week, Wright endeavored, whether consciously or not, to swallow both Obama and Obamaism. His onetime parishioner might be telling Americans that it was time to end our historic divisions, and Obama's young followers might be chanting "Race doesn't matter," but Wright would set them all straight. By heightening racial polarization, Wright delivered self-fulfilling prophecies of America's inability to transcend its racism.
On Tuesday, however, those prophecies were not fulfilled. By breaking forcefully with Wright and by refocusing on the economy, Obama came through the worst patch of his campaign to do better among white voters than he had in Ohio and Pennsylvania -- primaries that had preceded Wright's press club outburst. Obama pulled down 40 percent of the white vote in Indiana, an improvement over the 34 percent he won in Ohio and the 37 percent he won in Pennsylvania. He also won 37 percent of the white vote in North Carolina, which, notwithstanding the in-migration of Northern whites to the Research Triangle, is still a Southern state.
Among whites without college degrees -- that is, the white working class -- he did better as well. While he won just 27 percent of that vote in Ohio and 29 percent in Pennsylvania, he won 34 percent in Indiana (and 26 percent in North Carolina, where the white working class is particularly Southern). Cronus did not prevail. Obama, and his vision of a cross-racial majority, emerged strengthened.
By any rational measure, Obama dispatched the Clintons, too; there is virtually no way that Hillary Clinton can win the nomination now. Had she run as the caring populist from the outset, she might have prevailed. But her conversion from the most experienced candidate to the most caring (which entailed sacking strategist Mark Penn, who never understood how much the economy had changed since the late '90s) came too late.
If you must, you can still sketch a tenuous scenario in which Hillary can prevail, but the discord it would stir in Democratic ranks, particularly among African American and young voters, would damage the party for years. To do so, she would have to get the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to vote contrary to the wishes of Democratic primary and caucus voters, and prevail upon party committees to seat at full strength the Florida and Michigan delegations, even though Obama, in deference to the national party's rules, withdrew his name from the Michigan ballot. It would look to all the world like winning through chicanery, chiefly because that's exactly what it would be.
The bitterness and rage that this would engender among Obama supporters would be huge; the forthcoming Denver convention would probably turn into a 40th-anniversary rerun of the disastrous Chicago convention of 1968; and mobilizing what would otherwise be the core Democratic vote this fall would become a monumental challenge and, hence, a drain on party efforts to win over swing voters. The connection between the re-Clintonized party and black America would be gravely damaged; the connection between the party and most younger voters would be snapped. The Clintons prevail, that is, only by eating the Democratic young, by crippling the party, by damning themselves.
There's a name for this scenario, the only one in which Clinton defeats Obama. It's mutually assured destruction.
For this reason, among many others, Clinton will not prevail. It is inconceivable that the Democratic superdelegates will go to Denver only to bring down the temple on their own heads. Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee, and, in a year when the country wants new directions and the Republican nominee cannot even suggest one, he will probably be the next president as well.
This is a change election. Cronus has had better years.
This piece originally appeared in the Washington Post.
