Barack with a Beard
06.02.08
There are indications that Hillary Clinton may finally drop out of the race sometime later this week. (Emphasis "may.") This nearly three months after the Texas and Ohio primaries, where her chances officially slipped from "bad" to "no".
She won Ohio and sort of won Texas, but not with the margins she would have needed to flip the momentum or to significantly cut into Barack's delegate lead. From that point, she would have needed something like 70% of all the remaining delegates to beat him, and that was obviously never going to happen.
And yet she stayed in the race.
Now, a year ago, I liked Hillary Clinton. I would have been happy to vote for her for President. I couldn't understand the rabid Clinton-hate that seemed to infect so many otherwise rational people. She was smart. She was hard-working. And she used to wear cool glasses and date a guy with a crazy faux-fro. What's not to like?
But the heat of the campaign will get to you. I settled on Barack as my candidate early. I just never counted on him winning anything. Iowa came as a welcome shock. New Hampshire was a sobering dose of reality. By South Carolina, a narrative was forming.
Barack envisioned a new politics. Hillary offered more of the same. Barack talked about hope and unity. Hillary was divisive and manipulative. Barack was the good guy. Hillary was, by process of elimination, not.
Is that fair? I'm not sure I can be objective at this point. So let's consider this:
If things were different -- if we lived in some parallel world where Hillary all but clinched in March, and Barack was the one who stuck it out well past reason dictated it was over -- would I be cheering for the impossible? Would I be urging him to take it all the way to the convention?
I guess it depends on what kind of campaign Barack ran. Would he go negative? Or would we see a repeat of Mike Huckabee's "Not Math, But Miracles" routine? And if he was all sunshine and light (but not so much with the winning), wouldn't that wear thin after a while?
After all, the only thing that separates real hopes from false hopes is the winning, right?
Maybe the most frustrating thing about the Clinton campaign is the way that they willfully ignore reality. Asked what they might do if Barack wins enough delegates to secure the nomination this week, multiple Clinton surrogates responded this weekend, "I reject the premise of your question."
The Clinton campaign has been rejecting the premise of our reality for months now. Maybe if we saw some acknowledgement that she understood she was behind... Maybe if she showed some humility...
At this point, there's probably nothing she could do that wouldn't make me flinch or grimace or gerfluff. (At least one of the words in the last sentence may not be a real word.) If she concedes on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, that will probably make me angry. And I'd like to think it's because of the campaign she's run.
But the reality may just be that she's the enemy.
And everybody is somebody's enemy.