The End (We Hope) of Hillary

There's a story about JFK on the morning of his election as president saying of his opponent, Richard Nixon, who had churlishly semi-conceded, "He went out the way he came in -- no class."

Well, Dick Nixon was practically Fred Astaire compared to the way Hillary Clinton ended her campaign. Should we be surprised?

A number of columnists and pundits are writing Hillary Clinton's political obituary this week. If Barack Obama wins the White House and serves two terms, that would close off the presidency for a Democrat until 2016, which would almost certainly be too late for Hillary.

Gail Collins of the Times tries to be gracious about Hillary's defeat:

I get asked all the time whether I think Hillary lost because sexism is worse than racism in this country. The answer is no. She lost because Obama ran a smarter, better-organized campaign. It’s possible that she would have won if the Democratic Party had more rational primary rules. But Obama didn’t make up the rules, and Clinton had no problem with them until she began to lose.

Actually, this is not the whole story. Obama didn't just run a smarter campaign -- Hillary ran a dumber one. Obama didn't win this nomination so much as Hillary lost it -- lost it by her own hubris and her own arrogance. She thought this would be a coronation process that would be over in January, and by the time she figured out that it would be a fight it was too late. The Clintons held Obama in contempt as a lightweight, and before they knew what hit them he had run right over them.

Michael Crowley in the L.A. Times is pretty scathing:

A Washington mentality may even explain Hillary Clinton's astoundingly inept approach to the nominating process. The Clinton team seemed to treat the primaries more as a media narrative than a race for delegates. First, in their insider arrogance, Clinton's aides assumed that they could eliminate Obama early, in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. When that didn't happen, they focused on the importance of wins in such "big states" as California, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the Obama team grasped that it could lose such key high-profile contests and still take the nomination by methodically racking up delegates in smaller, unglamorous places the media had little interest in, such as Idaho, Colorado, Maine, Kansas and Utah.

When Obama started to overtake Clinton in the pledged delegate count, she fell back on the ultimate Washington insider's argument: that superdelegates, the creation of the inside-Washington party machine, would come to her rescue and override the will of the voters. Not only did this strategy fail, it enhanced Clinton's image as an insulated Beltway manipulator.

Even Clinton's supposed mastery of political media backfired on her. Her media team overplayed its hand early in the campaign, engendering resentment among reporters with a bare-knuckled, kill-or-be-killed philosophy cultivated during past Clinton scandals. Last September, for instance, Clinton aides forced GQ magazine to spike a critical story on her campaign by threatening to withhold access to Bill Clinton.

And other aides, notably Penn, became figures of ridicule with their constant over-spinning as they found ever-more creative ways to explain away Obama's wins and Clinton's losses (caucuses don't really count, Clinton won more "electoral votes," etc.).

Hillary's supporters didn't help either and are not helping now, as Collins points out:

They vowed to write in Hillary’s name on their ballots in November; to wear “NObama” T-shirts all summer; to “de-register” as Democrats. One much-circulated e-mail proposed turning June 3, the day Barack Obama claimed the nomination, as a permanent day of mournful remembrance “like the people in Ireland remember the Famine.”

With "friends" like these, do the Democrats really need enemies? Is this "If I can't win I'm going to take my ball and go home" attitude the way to win the White House?

Hillary was arrogant and stupid, blew the nomination and was too pig-headed to even admit it for close to a week. If she had won the general election and run the country the way she ran her campaign, her administration would have been a disaster. We should all be glad that she did not win the nomination, and let's hope that her followers grow up and vote the way they should in November, and not spend the Summer whining into their orange pekoe.

But I'm not hopeful about that last part.

Tom Moran