No, she can’t close the deal
She is arguably the most famous woman in America
Her husband, the most popular living ex-President, stumps tirelessly for her, tubthumping at between five and eight campaign events a day.
Her daughter - also a household name - holds daily campaign events at colleges, relentlessly soliciting the youth vote.
Her campaign has adopted a say-anything, do-anything policy, has abandoned any sense of restraint when it comes to attacking or smearing her opponent, has opened the floodgates of electoral total war.
Her surrogates - all of whom will similarly say anything, however ridiculous, however estranged from reason or the truth - bombard the mainstream media.
The mainstream media itself compliantly repeats her talking points, however fanciful, turning them into news and perpetuating the myth that this is a close race.
Her opponent, through principle and character, will not attack her back in the same way, thus leaving himself disarmed and apparently at a disadvantage.
Meanwhile he slips on banana skins of his own political making, uttering gauche remarks that can be easily twisted and misrepresented, so handing her free ammunition.
At the same time the Republican party attack dogs bring her opponent into their own sights, and begin firing off salvos, so that her opponent is fighting a defensive war on two fronts.
The media repeats the various specious charges - of unpatriotism, of elitism, of connivance with ancient radicals, of ultra left-wingery - against her opponent as if they are worthy of serious consideration, and creates a firestorm of distortion and manipulated voter emotion through which he has to walk if he is to win the nomination.
And yet, with all this in her favour, in the Pennsylvania primary - a state demographically perfectly aligned to her appeal, with a vast partisan political machinery bent solely to her election, and where she enjoys the endorsement and active stumping support of all but one of the state’s prominent Democratic politicians - her plurality of the vote drops from 25% in early March when campaigning began for real to 9% on the day of voting.
With all this in her favour, her opponent snuck up on her by 16 percentage points.
If Hillary Clinton was able to ‘close the deal’ on Barack Obama she would have won PA by a massive 25% plus, thus sending a torpedo across his bows from which he would not recover, and transmitting an unequivocal signal to the superdelegates whose support is her only means of winning the nomination that she truly is the more electable candidate.
But she tanked. And slowly, little by little, like the fabled tortoise to her hubristic hare, Obama is closing the deal.