Written April 7, 2008

I’ve grown bone-tired of the Democratic Party’s marathon attempt to crown a presidential nominee in the 2008 contest. Don’t get me wrong. I love a good race. I am crazy about politics. I can and do watch the cable news shows morning and night, M-F, and the Sunday shows, too. I read The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, the New Yorker’s political journals and profiles, and I take Newsweek for my dose of mass-produced media. I follow the blogs daily like some kind of maddened hound.

But I have a problem with the Democrats’ alleged race. Namely the fact that, by objective standards or simple political precedent, it simply isn’t one any longer. It isn’t even close. It isn’t in doubt. It’s just being willfully perpetuated. This is happening in large part due to the efforts of my candidate – Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Every week that goes by brings a new trial balloon carrying aloft the latest musings from her campaign on what the standards for victory in the primary ought to be. Most recently, the attempt from her quarter is to deconstruct the concept of pledged delegates to turn them into a massive flock of super-delegates lite: They too, she says, have an obligation to not merely cast their vote for the candidate on whose behalf they were named. Instead, she believes they must also perform the evaluative task of determining who will have “the best chance of winning in November.”

After weeks of this, I’m finally becoming both ashamed and disgusted. I’m waiting for her to next spell out in detail the manner in which pledged delegates must open the arteries of a hapless chicken on the convention floor and interpret the pattern of sprayed blood to pick the legitimate winner. One begins to get a frisson of Monty Python’s classic ‘dead parrot’ skit. For the love of God. It’s over!

Yes, Obama had a weird old coot preacher who was condemning and hot-headed toward America. He hollered and swore and wore garments that, to many white people, resembled the flowered print house dresses worn by their fat aunties. The whole spectacle gave many a bad feeling. No doubt. However - that does not, Oh Empress of Chappaqua and All You Survey, disqualify him from being our nominee. You need to win a lot more delegates than you have been winning, and you have a limited amount of time in which to do so. You need to turn some superdelegates, and you have been unable to do so. He’s grabbed 69 of these hotly-pursued souls during the past weeks, which have seen you lose two. That’s not a contest. That’s a rout.

The question is, what exactly is the landscape inside the mind of the Clintons that supports such strangely persistent belief in an alternate reality? What is this castle of denial they have built, the place in which they seem so comfortable living and acting out? It’s worth asking, because they are taking a fair number of people with them. Pulling that castle down, brick by booby-trapped brick, is going to be the task of Obama, his staff, and his supporters. It promises to be delicate work indeed. Already, accusations of sexism have begun to ring out whenever so much as a single surrogate’s voice rises to ask, “What does she think she is still doing in the race?” Tricky though it may be, this work of dismantling Clintonian delusion is crucial to Obama’s success.

As for Sen. Clinton herself, there’s no way to know what event in real life may permeate the stubborn bricks and mortar of her fantasy abode. It could be winning by less than 5 points, or losing outright, in Pennsylvania. It could be having a chunk of 40 to 60 more superdelegates go Obama’s way in the near term. Until the next cataclysm, she’s fighting, that’s for sure. She’s fighting over every definition of every term; fighting over every state, decided or disqualified; and fighting over each undecided superdelegate (with 10 staffers assigned, under Harold Ickes’s watchful eye, to keep them corralled in indecision in order to sustain the embers of hope that remain for her). All of this may be admirable. But it’s also undeniably disconcerting. It started to bother me in earnest about a month ago, and I wonder how many others might be similarly bothered. I wonder if the point has already been passed whereupon persistence itself begins to reap negative returns for the candidate forced to engage in it, and I wonder if or when my candidate will awaken to any reality other than the one she has managed, by sheer dint of will, to create. There’s no sign of it happening anytime soon, so on we go.

May 11, 2008

Hmmm…does any of that sound familiar? Here I sit on Mother’s Day, having watched Chelsea Clinton’s paean to her mother’s motherliness with the big red CONTRIBUTE button on the page. Hillary Rodham Clinton has still not stepped aside. Obama has been declared the winner on the cover of Time magazine. He won 50% of households making less than $50,000 a year in Indiana, challenging her to a draw among one of her most cherished constituency groups. He lost the state overall by what is now less than 1% of the vote (you see, the Indiana Sec. of State has now finished “counting every last vote,” a principle Clinton professes to hold dear – yet I haven’t heard her campaign acknowledge the final tally yet). In North Carolina, Obama won by 14%, and beat her outright in those less-than-$50,000 households. He also snagged over 222,000 in the popular vote, thereby erasing all she’d gained in Pennsylvania. As of today, he leads in superdelegate support, an additional metric he has now pinned down. Yet still, not only is Chelsea mass emailing tributes to her mom, but Bill has followed up with his own email to ask, “Did you have a chance to see the video Chelsea made for Hillary for Mother's Day? It's incredibly moving – I couldn't be more proud.”

There is, apparently, no person or cluster of persons who can get them to stop at this point. They will spin, and I will have to feel my blood pressure rising like a lethal tide within, as I watch Howard Wolfson drone on to morning Mika (and Joe) about numbers that are no longer even theoretically attainable; as I watch people with political clout who still insist on tip-toeing around the inevitable, cowed by some weird deference to Hillary; as I watch Barack Obama, my putative nominee, still saying robustly, as if it made sense, “She’ll step aside when she feels it’s time. Until then this race goes on.”

All I want is for someone to inject some reality here, for someone in my party to say, “Hellooooo! Enjoy your primaries, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Puerto Rico – have a ball. But Sen. Obama is our candidate, and let’s rally around him just a bit, shall we?” If people want to cast their symbolic votes for a woman for president in their own primary, God knows I respect that. I was all for Hillary. But when the reality is that she can no longer claim any remotely plausible scenario that leads her to the nomination, the answer is not to say, “But I can win the votes of alllll the hard-working white people. So there!” The answer is not to fan paranoia about some “October surprise” that may trip up Obama, while she herself is “fully vetted and ready from day one.” The answer is to call it a day. Woman up, Hill. Woman up. Stand before the cameras and acknowledge the facts, let us know that you can grasp the lay of the land, and throw support behind Sen. Obama.

I know, I know – she will when she’s ready. I just hope it’s not such an unseemly self-determined exit that it eradicates from our collective memory what was for a time her historic, strong run for the nation’s highest office.