Hillary's End

Clinton gets her Waterloo instead of the West Wing.

by David Faris

The candidacy of Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic party's presidential nomination was mortally wounded last Tuesday in the fog of the Potomac, and died two days ago in the Midwest. The idea that she can still win the nomination is as grand a delusion as the idea that Republicans can govern anything larger than a county Little League.

By now you can probably recite the litany of reasons that Obama is a superior candidate — he takes the independent vote away from John McCain and runs better against the Arizona senator in national opinion polls. His rhetorical flourish on the stump will bring out young voters and the politically marginalized in previously unimaginable numbers. He may or may not walk on water.

But for all his charms and gifts, Obama needed to put up the numbers, and convince voters that his judgment trumps Hillary's alleged edge in experience. Over the past month he has done so.

Clinton would need to lay double-digit shellackings on Obama in Ohio and Texas on March 4 to regain any kind of momentum, and that just isn't going to happen with trendlines in both states moving in Obama's direction.

Even so, it is mathematically possible that Clinton could go into the Democratic National Convention having prevented Obama from gaining enough delegates to win the nomination outright. But at this point, Clinton is on a 10-contest, '64 Phillies-style losing streak, and Obama has more total votes, more delegates and more states overall. There is simply no way Clinton can go to the convention under those circumstances and ask the "superdelegates" to overturn the people's preference.

Superdelegates were invented by Democratic party elitists after Jimmy Carter's loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980, to ensure that no more George McGovern figures would lead the party to one-sided general election defeats like the one suffered in 1972.

But superdelegates don't have a very good history. In 1984 they spurned the more electable Gary Hart in favor of former Vice President Walter Mondale, who went on to precisely the sort of epic trouncing these superdelegates were supposed to prevent. And the popular confusion about superdelegates' role is another good argument for the party to eliminate them immediately.

The reality is that the nominee is going to be the person with the most pledged (i.e. "elected directly or indirectly by actual voters") delegates, and that nominee is almost certainly going to be Barack Obama. He will probably be the nominee long before the party holds its convention in August, unless Clinton insists on some to-the-death grudge match while the Republicans lick their lips and prepare to pounce. But the voters see the grizzled, militarist visage of John McCain on the horizon and have made their choice.

Sen. Clinton ran a strong, honorable campaign that ran into a completely unexpected buzzsaw in Barack Obama. She should be applauded for her historic run, thanked for her contribution to an exciting and invigorating campaign, and enlisted in the fight against the Republicans.

In other words, Hillary's end has arrived. Now it's time to rally around Obama and to make sure that John McCain's end arrives promptly on Nov. 4, 2008.

David Faris is a frequent Slant contributor.