In a certain twisted way, it makes sense that Sen Hillary Clinton is taking an excruciatingly long time to acknowledge what polls and voters have ratified since February: she cannot win the Democratic nomination in 2008 and therefore will never be president.
As befits a sideways kind of New Yorker, if she does not make it here, she cannot make it anywhere. Obama is not going to fail renomination as incumbent president in 2012, and she will be too old in 2016 as well as having an incumbent vice-president to contend with. This horrid and implacable truth must haunt her.
Hers is a common problem in other lines of very public work. What we have here is the reluctant, resisted farewell tour of that once-hot rock band, The Clintons; and after this, they have to hang it up because -- despite all their practice -- their pipes are shot, they just can’t hit the notes anymore, and the public taste has moved beyond their smooth but superannuated act.
More Yet Below
In this light, Clinton is seen as confronting a final and irretrievable eclipse of her hopes of a spot on the world stage. Recoiling from this, her willingness to follow a Tonya Harding strategy (of procuring the kneecapping of an opponent whom she cannot defeat in open competition) becomes understandable, though no less unforgiveable.
She must have known it was now or never in March, and therefore never is now.
Strategically, the current Pennsylvania pile-on by Republicans and Clinton over Sen Barack Obama’s alleged elitism came not a moment too soon. He had best show he can counterpunch now, rather than later. And so far, so good.
But haven’t we heard this ‘elitist’ stuff before? Oh, yeah, I remember. It it is straight out of Richard Nixon's scumbag playbook. It’s what William Safire wrote for the disgraced Spiro Agnew to say about Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, George McGovern and anyone else who opposed the war, like Martin Luther King.
Moreover, ‘elitist’ is what the punditocracy calls people who connect with ordinary Americans better than they do.
Yet over at In-Trade, a Dublin, Ireland-based website where people trade on public affairs outcomes as if they were stocks, the consensus estimate of Clinton’s chances of winning the nomination peaked under 30% (just before she failed to sweep Super Tuesday) and has steadily declined to the current 17%.
The corporate media hasn’t caught up to the reality yet; but why should we expect them to do politics better than they do the economy or society? The Guardian’s Michael Tomasky, somewhat divorced from corporate media-think by being both European and employed by the world’s most progressive major English-language daily newspaper, puts her chances at 10%.
The specifics are already very clear. For an early April story, Reuters political correspondent John Whitesides interviewed Terry Madonna, a political analyst at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. (Sorry, lost the link but it was April 7.)
"If Obama gets within 5 percentage points of Clinton, he can declare victory anyway," Madonna said.
As most Kossacks must know, recent polls put him down a 6% margin, so movement to 4% is eminently possible.
Given the forthcoming Obama landslides in North Carolina and Indiana, as well as the completion of the Texas caucus process at the State convention in June with a substantial Obama victory, all the bolt-holes down which apologists for Clinton's stubborn persistence would like to scurry will be stoppered.
If necessary, the superdelegates, impervious to Clintonista blandishments to come on over to the losing side, will ratify the choice of primary voters and national polls alike by declaring for Obama. But it looks increasingly probable that pledged delegates, together with previously announced superdelegates, will get Obama over the top prior to all superdelegates having declared themselves, certainly prior to the convention.
The only explanation for Clinton’s blind endurance that makes any sense is psychological rather than political. Having imagined the presidency to be hers by right of inertial front-runnerism, establishmentarianism, and pre-positioning, Clinton cannot imagine that they did not work and, not having worked, are beyond resuscitation.
So we are in the denial stage of grief here as she begins mourning the loss of her historic opportunity at the hands of Obama’s equally historic, more grandly progressive one.
The other stages of grief -- anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance -- are yet to come, with the last two likely to be conducted in private. It is certainly a severe shock and sharp trauma to have been led to believe for years that the Presidency is yours for the asking only to find, at the last minute, that the asking you know how to do is insufficient.
For the situation has changed radically since Clinton began to entertain her hopes of the nomination long before the official early going. It has swiftly become clear that a cautious, centrist approach is not capable of firing up the American people in these dire times of war madness, torture, recession, environmental peril and flagrant unconstitutionality. Mere ability isn’t going to cut it this year, and that is a sad blow to she who sought to mute her controversiality under a cloak of competence.
But who could have known that a year ago? Not, evidently, the establishment candidate, who seems to have imagined that if she exerted enough psychic ju-ju on keeping Al Gore out of the race, she would be able to brush away the other contenders like so many nuisances.
Now, however, we have the slow and dismal grieving of a deprived and disappointed ego to contend with, rather than with any rational calculation or principled determination. There are no values upon which Clinton differs from Obama so largely as to demand she carry her standard into the convention in order to represent her delegates, unlike 1968 or as with Jesse Jackson in 1988. Nor is there any sound hope of the arithmetic changing in her favor.
If persisted in past Memorial Day, Hillary Clinton’s stubbornness may damage the Democratic party as badly as Bill Clinton’s maladroitness in the face of insane Republican malice once did. But she could be able to work her way through grief quickly enough to suspend her campaign within thirty days, once it sinks in that her likely minor Pennsylvania victory will have been wiped out shortly thereafter and that Florida and Michigan are never going to matter.
The pestilence George W. Bush has spread across the land has even infected the Democratic nomination process in this: as throughout his presidency, the petty demands of personal ego have replaced any substantive measures as the principal driver. Clinton caught the Bush plague of personalism, and now her candidacy is dying of it slowly enough to be a possible source of future contamination.
Strong enough to nominate Obama, America will have to be sturdy enough to withstand the side-effects of Clinton’s natural, but unfortunately prolonged, mourning for her dead future. As soon as she drags her personal sense of entitlement out of the headlines and into the privacy of her own home, she will improve the tone of the political arena.