Winning after having already lost
Re today’s Kentucky primary, I have to wonder how it feels to be Hillary Clinton: winning the primary, while having already lost the nomination. It makes me ask:
- Does she realize she’s already lost the nomination, or is she in denial?
- If she does realize, what’s behind all these pronouncements of pressing on? Is she waiting for Obama to bail out her multiple personal loans to the campaign? Is she unsure how to exit gracefully?
- If she doesn’t realize, is it because she’s been misled by husband Bill’s example? (Soldiering on at the height of the early adultery charges, then dubbing himself “The Comeback Kid” after a second-place finish in New Hampshire.) Someone should tell her: “We know Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was a president of ours. You’re no Bill Clinton.” Boys grow up wanting to be the king, and girls the princess, but most wind up as commoners.
- Or, maybe it’s neither. Maybe — and this seems to me the most shocking conjecture — maybe she actually thinks she can still win this. Maybe her hope that the usually cool and collected Obama blows it in some way that most of us would find hard to conceive. Maybe she actually thinks there is some way to prevail against the forces of:
- the pledged delegates (who have preferred Obama)
- and the superdelegates (who have preferred Obama, with more coming every day)
- and the party elders (Kennedy, Daschle, McGovern, Carter)
- and the fallen competitors (Richardson, Edwards, Dodd, Kucinich — indeed, almost every one of them except Gravel, who won’t even be able to get the Libertarian nomination)
- and some of the party apparatus (although he’s stayed neutral, I’m sure I can read Howard Dean’s mind on this one)
- and the primary voters, who by a wide margin have preferred her opponent in what is, definitionally, a popularity contest.
Can it be? Does she think she can win? Or is she just trying to leverage the best deal possible? Or is there one scenario she and her team had never envisioned, and therefore don’t know how to deal with: losing.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:32 am
This is where the fascinating drama is, which, of course, we will never be able to see. Who convinces her to get out and how do they do it? It’s sort of like taking the keys away from some proud person who clearly can’t drive anymore. Sad and hard, hard, hard.