It's all over but the crying for Hillary

[OhioChick]

Sun, March 2, 2008

There was a moment toward the end of the Democratic presidential debate in Cleveland last Tuesday when it was easy to feel sorry for Hillary Clinton.

The former First Lady hadn't done much since the top of the show to endear herself to anyone who wasn't already voting for her, what with the health care hectoring and the whining about always going first and the old evil eye trick.

But as Barack Obama was talking about how Mrs. Clinton doesn't owe anyone an explanation as to why she's a worthy opponent, the sad reality of Hillary Clinton's predicament conjured a fleeting wave of sympathy.

Mrs. Clinton's careening campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is already shaping up to be the most thoroughly autopsied in the history of modern democracy and the body's not even horizontal yet, much less cold.

While superdelegates madly plot to find a "Here's your husband, what's your hurry?" strategy for getting the Clintons to go away quietly without resorting to a stun gun and a net if she loses both Texas and Ohio March 4, the campaign forensics nuts (including yours truly), are already arguing over the COD.

Under the original Clinton campaign plan, the first week of March after Super Tuesday would have weeded out the last of the also-rans, including that silver-tongued pain-in-the-ass Obama. Mrs. Clinton would now be reminding Americans of how crumbly and corrupt and hotheaded John McCain is. Instead, she's still trying to convince Democrats that Barack Obama should be ashamed of himself.

INCONSISTENT MESSAGE

Much of the premature Monday morning strategizing about the Clinton campaign (it ain't over 'til March 5 and just maybe, if she wins somewhere, anywhere, March 4, not even then) focuses on the wildly inconsistent message, the Bill factor, the fundraising incompetence, the overspending.

But every one of those issues is really about arrogance: We don't need a message, we're running as the incumbent; we have one of the most popular presidents in history as our understudy; and we don't need little-people money, we have wealthy friends who'll buy access.

The Clinton campaign was run from right out of the gate as though it were just an unseemly formality, an inconvenient hurdle between the Clintons and their right to recapture a legacy tragically derailed by what Mrs. Clinton euphemistically called in an interview last week with a Christian broadcaster, "What happened during the '90s."

Senator Clinton and her braintrust never took Barack Obama seriously as a threat, despite all the signs after his 2004 Democratic convention speech that everyone else in Washington did. Which may mean that the one-way conversation they had with the American people about race before both New Hampshire and South Carolina was just the retail manifestation of a cherished article of faith; that many Americans wouldn't vote for a black presidential candidate.

RACIAL CODE

Maybe that's why much of what was said by Hillary and Bill in January smacked of racial code intended to remind Americans that they were seriously contemplating doing precisely that, as though it hadn't dawned on them already.

At the same time, Bill Clinton knew a star when he saw one because he'd been one himself. The former president wistfully told a New Hampshire crowd the day before the primary, "I can't make her younger, taller, male . . . there's a lot of things I can't do." In other words, not only is she no me, but if people want change so badly they're willing to vote for a black man, then we're cooked because he's got everything else going for him, too.

They never had a strategy beyond riding back into town on a wave of Clinton nostalgia, female pride in a historic first and Bush fatigue, and they never had a ground strategy beyond Super Tuesday. The flailing that has filled the vacuum since then has been so weird at times that Mrs. Clinton has looked more like Wile E. Coyote trying to outwit the Roadrunner with yet another Acme just-add-water contraption than the hare sleeping on the roadside as the tortoise coasts by.

In a different world, Hillary Clinton would have been the renegade, the change agent and the historic first. In this world, Obama decided to run for president this time. That she didn't see him coming may say more about her judgment, her experience and who she is than just about anything else she's ever done.

http://www.edmontonsun.com/Comment/2008/03/02/4887537-sun.html