It has been a gripping, grueling electoral contest watched with bated breath by the nation and the wider world. The once inevitable victor, the long anointed leader, loses to an upstart, an insurgent candidate too young to have participated in the defining and divisive political battles of yesteryear. Change seems to trump experience, the future to overtake the past. But the trounced older leader refuses to accept the younger opponent's incredible, historic victory. The delusional entitlement to power, the almost deranged self-absorption, the frightening lack of simple political grace surprises, indeed shocks, many except the leader's own sycophantic supporters.
That is the story of Robert Mugabe in this year's presidential elections in Zimbabwe and Hilary Clinton in the just concluded Democratic Party's primary elections in the United States. Hillary Clinton is a pale Robert Mugabe of American politics. Like President Mugabe, Senator Clinton seems congenitally incapable of countenancing defeat, of facing the remorseless realities of loss, of following the elemental rules of democratic politics. With insufferable arrogance and insolent narcissism both withhold concessions of defeat and desperately connive to snatch victory out of the jaws of monumental, yet predictable, electoral rejection.
Both seek to terrorize their opponents to achieve goals thwarted by the voters, to intimidate their victorious opponents. President Mugabe sought run-off elections and has used physical violence to ensure victory, Senator Clinton angles for a place on the presidential ticket and has been applying intense and unseemly political pressure. President Mugabe and Senator Clinton unleash their sycophants to bully Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader, and Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, respectively. One goes for street mobilization, the other for digital mobilization. And there are hints of more macabre machinations: fears of assassination for Mr. Tsvangirai, invocations of assassination for Senator Obama.
Such is the two leaders' stupefying cognitive dissonance from political reality that they don't seem to care about the destructiveness of their irredeemable egotism on their respective parties and countries. In the isolated, paranoid worlds they live, sequestered by their self-seeking cronies, they imagine they embody the fate of their parties and encapsulate the highest possibilities of their countries, for President Mugabe African nationalism, for Senator Clinton white feminism. Their obsession with political power knows no price, recognizes no boundaries, hanging and hovering untethered to the interests of their parties and countries to reconstruct their battered domestic economies and restore their tattered international standing; goals their victorious opponents advocate.
Reality and truth are predictably banished from their vocabularies of unwavering self-deception and legendary tenacity. President Mugabe blames his loss on conniving westerners, not his gross mismanagement of his country's affairs, and Senator Clinton finds fault with sexism not the disorganization of her campaign. Both seek vindication from imaginary math, claiming they are more popular than their younger opponents: Senator Clinton facetiously avers she won the popular vote, President Mugabe asserts he remains popular with the liberated and increasingly impoverished masses. They betray no sense of responsibility for their own failures; their agency only stops at the door of success.
They cynically brandish their supporters as bargaining chips to the altar of their personal political ambitions. The most fanatical and anguished of their more hapless followers happily oblige, in the case of Senator Clinton's fanatics warning of their intentions to vote for the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, in the November elections, and in the case of President Mugabe's zealots threatening to punish those who vote for Mr. Tsvangirai in the June runoff elections. In the meantime, their better heeled cronies afraid of marginalization from the possible new centers of power campaign for Senator Clinton's appointment as Senator Obama's Vice-Presidential running mate, while those around President Mugabe canvass for a government of national unity.
The diehard Clintonists and Mugabeists are not afraid to dangle their respective nuclear options. For the former it entails taking the nomination battle all the way to Democratic convention in Denver in August, hoping that by then Senator Obama would have imploded from some scandal, or would be so wounded from the Democratic infighting that he would be unelectable, or as Senator Clinton herself imprudently reminded everyone there is the unpredictable hand of assassination that terminated Robert Kennedy's life and candidacy. For the latter, there is the prospect of a coup by loyalist generals who cannot fathom saluting a President Tsvangirai.
Analogies are of course never exact. It is obvious that Zimbabwe and the United States are very different countries. One is an imperial superpower, the other an underdeveloping country. And President Mugabe and Senator Clinton differ from each other in terms of the obvious social inscriptions of race and gender. Moreover, President Mugabe is an exhausted dictator who has been in power for twenty-eight years, while Senator Clinton is an indefatigable aspirant for the presidency. One has been involved in a national election, the other in a party nomination.
But analogies can yield important insights. In this case, it shows that destructive political ambition among leaders transcends levels of national development, gender, and race. Senator Clinton and President Mugabe share uncanny similarities in their obsessive worship of power for its own sake, notwithstanding their self-serving and varied rhetorics about national liberation and feminist empowerment, respectively.
If Americans want to understand African leaders like President Mugabe, they need not look far: they might want to start with Senator Clinton's behavior in the Democratic Party's presidential nomination contest. And if Democrats want to appreciate the perils of a leader singularly and shamelessly focused on attaining or retaining personal or dyanstic power, regardless of the consequences on his or her party and country, they need not bother with the stubbornly inept President Bush, Senator Clinton is their doggedly studious example.
I would have preferred to write on Senator Obama's historic nomination as the presumptive presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. But I found Senator Clinton's indefensible failure thus far to concede defeat let alone to congratulate her victorious opponent who has been most gracious to her in recent weeks rather intriguing. Many commentators probably find themselves in this position: amazed by Senator's Clinton's all-consuming drive to deny Senator Obama his day in the sun, to undermine his electoral prospects, to upstage him, the first black--black man--presidential nominee of a major party, tarnishing one of the most important days in the political history of this republic founded on the original sin of slavery and racism.
Were the shoe on the other foot and Senator Clinton was the nominee, which would have been equally historic in making her the first woman--white woman-- presidential nominee, I doubt Senator Obama would not have had the political decency to acknowledge her victory and congratulate her. The difference between the two must be rooted in different senses of entitlement to power. A black man, whatever his ambition, in a country where no black person has ever risen to the supreme political office in the land simply cannot match, at this historical moment, the sense of entitlement of a white woman married to a former president.
As I finish writing this commentary, I hear reports that Senator Clinton will finally concede defeat, end her campaign, and endorse Senator Obama on Saturday. Clearly, Senator Clinton over-reached after Senator Obama claimed the nomination in her inexcusable lack of graciousness. What a disconcerting end to a riveting contest for a politician of such great promise. Democratic leaders and even some of her supporters seem to have been shocked into a realization of the widening and dangerous gulf between the senator's personal interests and the party's interests. It is a lesson that many of us who used to admire President Mugabe as a liberation hero learnt sometime ago: personal ambition and misguided entitlement to power should never be allowed to override collective aspirations for national and social progress.