Now it's on Indiana. And North Carolina. And Oregon. And... all the way to
Denver late in August? The votes are in from the Keystone State: Hillary
Clinton, the once - and future? - Inevitable Nominee now has scored a solid
but scarcely decisive victory over another formerly Inevitable Nominee. So
the race to mutual exhaustion goes on.
By winning convincingly in Pennsylvania, Senator/Mrs./Comeback Kid Clinton
has not won the nomination but the chance to keep on fighting, fighting,
fighting for it. Once again she's stopped the Charisma Kid in his well-oiled
tracks - but without taking a clear lead herself.
All along, Hillary! has been claiming that
Barack Obama was an unknown quality. She said he hadn't been vetted, as the
political consultants put it in their awful lingo, the way she has been
forever and ever - and don't we know it! Miss Hillary has been vetted so
long, to lapse into the colloquial, she's been mighty nigh ruint. Or as the
pollsters would say in their grating way, she's got the highest negatives of
the three still-standing presidential candidates.
Sen./Tigress Clinton has set out to do the vetting of her Democratic
opponent herself - vet him to shreds if she can. And primary after primary,
with more than a little help from her rival's miscues, she's succeeding -
not necessarily in winning her party's presidential nomination but in seeing
to it that, by the time her opponent does, he'll be damaged goods.
This is a Democratic donnybrook only a Republican could love. At one point
Hillary Clinton claimed that she and, yes, John McCain were the only
candidates in this three-cornered bout that the American people could trust
to answer that famous red phone at 3 a.m. As a Democratic presidential
candidate, Sen. Clinton delivers a pretty good commercial for the Republican
one.
What a show. At this wild and woolly point, the campaign for the Democratic
nomination has got all the subtlety of the WWE, the delicacy of the NFL, and
the refinement of NASCAR. That is, none at all.
Rome had its bread and circuses; this our new Rome has presidential
elections. To quote Finley Peter Dooley's sage Irish barkeep and doctor of
philosophy, the great Mister Dooley himself, politics ain't beanbag. Of
course it isn't; it lacks beanbag's intellectual honesty.
The ever-quotable Mr. Mencken once said nobody ever went broke
underestimating the taste of the American public, or multisyllabic words to
that effect. A cynic could as well say that nobody ever lost a presidential
race that way, either.