Hillary Clinton is dead woman walking, but won't admit it
Despite her hopeless plight, she refuses to quit
L. IAN MACDONALD
The Gazette
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
There's an old Newfoundland saying that applies to Hillary Clinton's
presidential campaign -
she's dead but she won't lie down.
She has an op****tunity to make a graceful exit following her blowout win
in last night's West
Virginia primary. More likely, she might well soldier on until the primary
season comes to an
end in early June.
It doesn't matter. It's over. Barack Obama is going to be the Democratic
nominee for president
of the United States.
Obama now has an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates, popular vote
and number of states
won. In the last week, he has also overtaken her lead among super
delegates, who were her last
hope to achieve an unlikely victory on the floor of the Democratic
convention.
It takes 2,025 delegates to win the nomination. After last night's votes
were counted and
delegates distributed on a pro****tional basis, Obama was within 140 votes
of victory, and she
was still about 165 votes behind him.
If the Democrats had the Republicans' winner-take-all rules, Clinton
pointed out the other day,
"I'd already be the nominee."
Yes, and if pigs had wings, then they could fly.
The Clintons are very good at moving the goalposts, and bending logic to
suit their case.
The magic number of 2,025 is based entirely on pledged and superdelegates.
But for weeks the
Clinton campaign has argued that if she could overtake Obama's two-point
lead in the popular
vote-about 700,000 votes out of more than 31 million cast - then she could
claim the moral high
ground and make the argument that superdelegates should make her the
nominee.
And of course, if you counted the null-and-void primaries in Florida and
Michigan, where Obama
wasn't even on the ballot, then she would actually be ahead in the popular
vote.
Furthermore, Clinton argued last week, the magic number isn't really
2,025, but 2,212, if the
Florida and Michigan delegates were seated. But even if that happened, and
it won't, her path
to the nomination would be incredibly difficult. Neither candidate
campaigned in Florida, where
she got 50 per cent of the vote to his 33 per cent. Even under that
distribution, Obama would
receive a third of Florida's 210 disallowed delegates. As for Michigan,
there would have to be
another vote or a caucus to achieve any fair allocation of its 156
delegates. And in any vote
with his name on the ballot, Obama would sweep Detroit, with its im****tant
black population,
and the big university towns of Lansing and Ann Arbor, home of Michigan
State and Michigan
universities.
Even if the goalposts were moved, as Clinton has suggested, the only
result would be to push
Obama across the goal line.
And then there's the money. There's always the money. The Clinton campaign
is worse than broke.
It is $25 million in debt. The Clintons themselves have loaned the
campaign $11 million, with
the remainder owed to consultants and suppliers. At some point, you can't
put a Boeing 757
charter in the air unless the airline gets paid. Obama, on the other hand,
has $50 million cash
on hand, and no debt.
One of the reasons for her to stay in is to raise enough money to pay down
her debt. But
staying in costs a lot of money every day. At some point, as in any
business, the question
becomes when do you stop throwing good money after bad?
Then why doesn't she see it? Why doesn't Bill Clinton see it? Well, they
are not quitters.
Indeed, she has struck a populist note as the tribune of women and
blue-collar, white voters.
Economists and pundits universally panned her proposal of a federal
gas-tax holiday as a dumb
idea. But she said she knew truck drivers would appreciate it.
And while her campaign has been fatally flawed, the candidate has proven
she is tournament
tough, with no quit in her. Furthermore, no one can tell a leader****p
candidate when to get out
of a race. She has to come through all the stages of grief. But at some
point she has to
recognize that for the good of the Clinton brand, her husband's as well as
her own, this needs
to be over. Then there's the well-being of the party, in addition to her
own.
There's a point where doomed campaigns start quoting Yogi Berra, that "it
ain't over 'til it's
over." That's usually when it's over.
www.lianmacdonald.ca
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