Now that Snipergate has temporarily shoved aside Racegate in the furious media death spiral characterizing the Democratic presidential contest, it's premature to assume that McCain's big bounce in the national polls will hold fast once Obama closes the super-delegate deal. Until then, it will be awhile for the campaign curtain to close, for Hillary to take her final curtsy, wipe away the bitterness, and bravely soldier on like she's done her entire life.
In the waning months of the primary season, she's become like an old Pink Panther movie, in which the same scene goes on way too long. (This would drive film critics like Pauline Kael nuts. "Director Black Edwards simply doesn't know when to quit!") Neither does Hillary.
At least, Al Gore had the grace, decency, and dignity not to fight the Republicans after the Supreme Court handed Bush the 2000 election under dubious circumstances. Gore placed country over ego, national interest before self-interest, and belief in the sanctity of law instead of personal ambition, even though he was cruelly deprived of own, rightful place in history as our forty-third president.
Because Hillary steadfastly believes in her own predestined role in history, she will carry on until the convention, dragging around the carcass of her campaign like the body in Weekend at Bernie's. It's not so much that Ms. Comeback Kid will stage a miraculous return from the dead in Denver; it's that she refuses to relinquish what she's see as her unique historic calling to fix the country.
Her memoir was called Living History, though she habitually fails to live up to the title's grandiloquent claim. Whether fictitiously dodging bullets in Bosnia, fixing the mess in Ireland, or whitewashing the facts about Whitewater or commodity trading, she maintains a con man's flexible and utilitarian approach to truth-telling. This Yale-bred lawyer parses with the best of them -- and that includes husband Bill. If he is the syntactical master of "is," she is the mistress of "was."
The past is continually re-invented and re-imagined by her, because she believes it suits a higher purpose. She's a know-it-all who knows what's best for the rest of us. That is why she comes off sounding like either a hectoring scold or smug policy wonk on the campaign trail, except in those rare instances when that austere mask drops, and the light of human warmth briefly flickers.
Ironically, though politics is so very personal for her, she refused to adopt a more personal, relaxed campaign style. Whereas Obama is cool and loose, she's tight and rigid. As others have amply noted, the blueprint for her campaign was scripted and focus-group tested by her chief strategist Mark Penn who wanted voters to always see her as an experienced leader, ready for Day One.
Well, Day One for Hillary will almost certainly be taking place in Chappaqua, New York -- and not 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. America won't regret this. It will spar us another prolonged episode of Clintonian dysfunction on the national stage. Nor was it ever a matter of "her time" to be president, that she somehow earned the right to be the nation's first female president until Barack jumped the line. How did she earn this right? Hillary's team seethes with red-hot anger at the prospect of Mr. Benneton in the Oval Office.
Just maybe, only when the Democratic Party's tangled electoral string is nearly played out, the Clinton campaign coffers are bone-dry, and the few remaining uncommitted super-delegates refuse to take her 3:00 a.m. call, Hillary will concede defeat. But until then, things will probably get nastier and uglier. Anything to sully Obama's glistening robes. Following her odd and politically convenient rapprochement with right-wing bagman Richard Mellon Scaife, it will be sheer poetic justice when Hillary, in her concession speech, blames her loss on "a vast left-wing conspiracy."