|
WORD COUNT
662
MAY 28, 2008
YOU KNOW, MAYBE IT’S
OVER – by Donald Kaul
Keith Olbermann, the
liberally acerbic MSNBC quacker, has likened Hillary Clinton to Wiley E.
Coyote, the Road Runner cartoon character who repeatedly runs off cliffs
but never falls until he looks down and realizes his predicament.
The analogy fails
because Hillary never looks down. Bowing to reality is not her thing.
She is much more the
Black Knight of the sublime comedy, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
In it King Arthur, on his quest for the Grail, is challenged to a duel
by a knight clad in black. In the fight that follows, Arthur cuts off
the knight’s left arm at the shoulder, but the knight continues to
fight.
“’Tis but a scratch,” he
says.
Arthur cuts off his
challenger’s right arm at the shoulder. The knight begins to kick the
king.
“You’ve got no arms
left,” Arthur says.
“Yes, I have,” says the
knight. “It’s just a flesh wound. I’m invincible.”
Reluctantly, Arthur cuts
off the fellow’s legs---first one then the other---and stalks by what’s
left of the fallen knight, who shouts after him: “Come back here. I’ll
bite your legs off.”
That’s Hillary. She
begins where indomitable leaves off.
That’s not an entirely
unattractive attribute, particularly in a politician, but there reaches
a point where it gets a little creepy. Sen. Clinton is at that point
right now. What part of “you lost” doesn’t she understand? She has a
perfect right to continue her run for president (just as I have a right
to declare myself a pretender to the Romanian throne) but she has some
responsibility to use arguments that make sense. None of hers do.
For example, she says
that she’s ahead in the popular vote. She’s not; not by any fair count.
She’s ahead by the slimmest of margins if you don’t count any of the
caucus states AND you count the votes in Michigan and Florida.
But before the primaries
began, she and the rest of the Democratic candidates agreed to ignore
the Michigan and Florida votes because they’d moved up their primaries
without permission.
Her campaign manager at
the time said:
“We believe Iowa, New
Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in
the nominating process.”
That was then, when she
was well in the lead and trying to suck up to early primary voters. Now
things look different and she wants to change the rules she agreed to.
In addition, she somehow neglected to have her name taken from the
Michigan ballot so that she was the only candidate running there. She
got 55 percent of the vote against nobody, now she wants those votes
counted too.
She says she’ll be the
strongest candidate for the Democrats in the fall and says things like
“As Kentucky goes, so goes the nation.”
If that’s the case then
the Democrats are in real trouble because Kentucky is going Republican
in the fall.
She says she’s the one
who can carry the swing states and the super-delegates should take that
into account when they finally vote on whom the nominee should be.
Sen. Clinton might very
well be the strongest candidate but, given the cockamamie way Democrats
choose their candidates, we’ll never know. (Did you ever get the feeling
that the Democrats’ nominating process was designed by the Republican
National Committee?)
In any case, Sen.
Clinton has several liabilities as a national candidate.
For one thing, she’s a
woman. She may think all those hard-working white men who helped give
her those huge margins in Appalachia were won over by her feminist charm
but I think she’d find a lot of them were voting against the black guy
and they’ll switch to McCain in the fall. For another, she’s a Clinton,
a species that some Republicans view with an antipathy generally
reserved for the anti-Christ. Republicans will leave deathbeds to vote
against her.
And for a third
thing---the race is over.
That’s no flesh wound,
Hillary---you lost.
--
Don Kaul is a two-time
Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account,
is right more than he's wrong. Email:
dkaul2@earthlink.net --
A photo of Donald Kaul is available
CLICK HERE
# # # # # #
|
