Be gentle, it's my first DKos diary. I'm no stranger to vigorous online debate, but I'm pretty new here and I understand that different places have different cultures.
I have been watching the furor over Clinton's RFK assassination reference with a weird mix of disgust, glee, and puzzlement. Her statement was disgusting, as it has been every time she has said it, starting about 2 months ago when she said the same thing in a Time interview. I was tickled pink by the way the MSM latched onto this instance and by how many of the talking heads agreed that this may well be the end of her campaign, including her chances at the VP slot. But I was puzzled by the absence of the analysis I did not hear, and which I have not seen here or anywhere else Friday evening.
Hillary Clinton was not inciting murder or providing a logical rationale for her continuing but fundamentally hopeless campaign based in the chance of a catastrophe. In other words: she was not really answering the question being asked. She was simply making a harshly pragmatic electability argument to the only audience that really matters now: the superdelegates.
More below....
Let me be clear: I am not much of a follower. If I thought Hillary could lead a competent campaign capable of beating McCain and pulling along a true working progressive majority in Congress and the country at large, I'd be behind her. Instead she has demonstrated her incapacity to do so while Barack Obama has made a spectacular demonstration of his competence both as a technical politician and as an inspirational leader, and I believe that we need both of those competencies.
With that said, back to my point about Hillary's offensive non-answer for why she has stayed in the race, specifically referring to 1992 and 1968.
This is not a new answer or some random brainfart because Teddy has cancer. She has been referring to 1992 and 1968 in response to questions about the inevitability of her losing (with and without the 'a-word') for months. This is a thought-out talking point.
This is not a logical answer to that sort of question either. 1968 and 1992 are lousy analogies to this year, except perhaps for the fact that the math looked pretty bad for Jerry Brown, and he was really playing to force a brokered convention by winning big in CA. Of course, 1968 had a radically different nominating process and serious party fracturing before June that even Bobby couldn't have fixed, so trying to say that this year is like 1968 is a lousy idea.
So what is she doing? Simple: she's planting the seeds of a harshly pragmatic electability argument (aimed at the only remaining electorate that could save her: superdelegates) that she cannot voice explicitly. Just as she cannot talk bluntly about the voters who are numerous in Appalachia and the Ozarks who will reliably vote against Obama, she cannot directly say:
Obama is a dead man walking, I'm more electable than a corpse, and I'm most electable without an overshadowing corpse.
Anyone who thinks the superdelegates don't give such darkness serious thought is wrong. These are professional pragmatic politicians. Many of them remember 1968 and many have been convinced that 1992 was the exorcism of Bobby's Ghost, and that it was a good and needed thing. Hillary is speaking to those people.