Bad Day at Black Rock

Bad Day at Black Rock was a 1955 movie starring Spencer Tracy. In the movie, Robert Macreedy (Tracy) steps off a train in Black Rock, a bleak backwater town in the Arizona desert, where he had gone to deliver a posthumous award to the family of a Japanese-American who died heroically in World War II. What Macreedy didn’t know was that the townspeople shared a terrible secret, and from the moment he arrived he suffered a series of unpleasant experiences.

He was refused a room at the town’s only hotel, the local mechanic refused to rent him a car, and the local sheriff was a drunk who was unable to help him. Everything went downhill from there.

This is essentially where Democrats find themselves today. It is as if they were just stepping off the train in Black Rock, Ariz., not knowing what lay in store for them. After a primary season in which nine candidates capitalized on an unpopular war and an equally unpopular president, and with gasoline prices at more than $4.00 a gallon, the conventional wisdom was that they would coast to an overwhelming victory in November. But that’s not what’s happening.

After energizing black voters as Jesse Jackson and other black candidates never could, their presumptive nominee, an egocentric neophyte from Chicago, Barack Obama, suffered a series of major setbacks…all at the hands of those closest to him. First, his wife said in a speech in Wisconsin that, for the first time in her life, she was proud of her country. She also suggested that in America, in 2008, life is not good. She said we’re a divided country that is “downright mean” and “guided by fear.”

Next, Obama was deeply embarrassed by his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, causing Americans to wonder how he could possibly remain a member of Wright’s congregation for nearly twenty years without ever taking the pastor to task for his blatantly racist and anti-American views.

Then, just as the Rev. Wright controversy was beginning to fade, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a member of Obama’s Catholic Advisory Council, publicly mocked and ridiculed Senator Hillary Clinton in the cruelest possible way, painting Clinton as a tearful woman who assumed that the Democratic nomination would be hers just for the asking.

And finally, we learned of Obama’s anti-war terrorist friends, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, and his Communist mentor of his teen years, Frank Marshall Davis. Suddenly, Democrats in large numbers were asking themselves, “Do we really know enough about this man? Do we really want this man, the most liberal member of the United States Senate, as the leader of our country, and his bitter and hate-filled wife as First Lady?”

It seemed that no man in the history of American politics had ever had such an unbroken string of bad luck in the selection of friends, lovers, mentors, and pastors. But by the time primary voters came to know all of these things it was too late; Obama and his radical left supporters had knocked all but one of his primary competitors, Senator Hillary Clinton, out of the race.

In a last ditch effort to forestall an Obama victory, Sen. Clinton warned Democrats in late May not to count their chickens before they were hatched. She said, “We all remember that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” While true, it was a politically insensitive remark that was widely condemned as the last gasp of a dying campaign…but not necessarily.

As July turned to August and the party convention approached, Democrats were riding high. Before a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin, Obama exclaimed, “People of the world!! This is our time!!” So high that, in Washington, Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to bring a comprehensive energy bill to the floor for a vote, proclaiming, “I am trying to save the planet!!”

Meanwhile, back on Earth, rumors were circulating that Clinton’s people would stage floor demonstrations at the Denver convention, forcing a non-binding “vote of conscience” by the delegates. There was even a suggestion that Clinton might have her name placed in nomination from the floor of the convention, forcing her way onto the ticket as Obama’s running mate.

But like the citizens of Black Rock in 1955, Democrats in 2008 were sitting atop a terrible little secret. Following Hillary’s cryptic warning of some unforeseen event that could scuttle Obama’s hopes, it was learned that former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, the third place finisher in this year’s Democratic primaries, had engaged in an extra-marital affair with a campaign volunteer. It was also speculated that Edwards was the father of the woman’s infant child.

In a comic scene that not even Hollywood screenwriters could produce, Edwards took refuge in a men’s restroom in the basement of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, using physical force to prevent tabloid reporters from entering the room to ask why he was seen leaving the woman’s room at 2:40 a.m. This self-inflicted wounding of a promising political career took place just three miles from the Ambassador Hotel where Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968.

Now, with their nominating convention just days away, mainstream Democrats are face-to-face with two stark realities. First, they are slowly coming to the realization that, if primary voters had known in advance of Barack Obama’s radical friends and associates, he would never have survived the Democratic primaries. And finally, they are haunted by the thought that, if primary voters had known earlier this year of Edwards’ sexual adventures, the lion’s share of his support would have gone to Clinton, Obama would have been knocked out of the race, and Hillary Rodham Clinton would now be the undisputed candidate of the Democratic Party.

So, as they pack their bags for the trip to Denver, Democratic “super delegates” must be taking a long look at their hole card, realizing that both of Clinton’s final primary opponents had feet of clay, and that both men, each in his own way, cost her the nomination. Chances are, when they arrive in Denver they won’t be singing “Happy Days are Here Again.” They may, instead, be thinking more in terms of Spencer Tracy and his Bad Day at Black Rock.

Anyone still think God doesn’t have a morbid sense of humor?