A Grieving Process

Something interesting is going on in
the Democratic primary which everyone is missing. (There is hope4survivors you know.)

While the media natters about how
nasty this is getting, Clinton supporters themselves reveal a deeper
truth.

Whether it’s in their anger
at being outnumbered, or their attempts to bargain away
from the inevitable,
whether it’s a denial of their own reality
or self-flagellating depression,
what becomes obvious is we’re seeing a grieving process at work.

Usually the candidate goes through this
process for us, and delivers the campaign’s death blow in a
seppuku-like speech. The Edwards campaign went like that. One day
you’re out there, and the next you’re not – it’s a car crash way to
go.

As a longtime Democrat I’ve become an
expert on campaign grief, since I’ve gone through it so often. I can
only remember supporting one winner in my entire life, Bill Clinton,
and I can only remember being really happy about it once, in 1992.

Everything else has come to grief.

With Al Gore I went through all the
stages long before the election. With Howard Dean I withdrew into a
shell and never really “came out” for Kerry until election night,
when I watched his loss roll in at a hotel ballroom with a cash bar.
I avoided newspapers for days after Dukakis’ loss. The size of
Mondale’s defeat left me stunned.

I see what’s happening with the Clinton
people because I know from grieving. The arithmetic of a nomination
fight is inevitable. There’s a cancer eating away at the prospective
Hillary Clinton Presidency. Numbers. She “won” Ohio and Texas, but her
gains from that were wiped out by Wyoming and Mississippi. Now the
drift toward Obama has renewed itself.

The “gotchas” which the Clintonites see as his “bad week,”
the Rezko trial and the Preacher Wright flap,
have merely reminded people that she has financial skeletons and that
Obama is, in fact, a Christian. (You can’t hammer on him about the
evils of his Church of Christ pastor and call him a Muslim at the
same time.)

The process still has a ways to go, but
the good news is Obama himself seems to sense what’s going on.

That’s
why he continues to insist on keeping a velvet glove on, even while
piling the iron fist into Clinton’s arguments. He’s like a fighter
who has beaten their opponent and is looking to the doctor or the ref
to stop it before someone gets killed, while the opponent goes gamely
on searching for a haymaker that will turn things around.

It won’t happen. Barring a bullet, or a
hooker, or something equally calamitous, Barack Obama will be the
Democratic nominee. There is nothing she, nor her supporters, can do
to stop it. That’s the way the system works. The media is acting like
this is a live contest only because they’re the crowd at the fight –
they want to see blood, not the ref waving his hands and hugging the
loser.

There will be no Clinton restoration.
Once her supporters come to an acceptance of that fact, the real
campaign can begin. And for most that won’t happen until she accepts
it.

She will accept it.

Probably long
before Denver.

My over-under best guess is it will happen on May 7.
She’ll win Pennsylvania, maybe by 10 points, and watch Obama get 45%
of the state’s delegates. Then he’ll beat her 6 and 4 in North
Carolina and she’ll recognize that, even if she won a do-over with
Michigan, she can’t win a floor fight on Florida.

The final
bargaining will probably mean giving her and her husband a “day”
of the proceedings – probably Wednesday – where she’ll be placed
in nomination and then give a scripted withdrawal  urging he be chosen
by acclamation.

Then he’ll come out from behind the
curtain like the groom at a wedding. He’ll hug her close, for a long,
long time, then he’ll hug Bill to take the sting off it. He’ll raise
one arm, smile his beautiful smile and it’ll all be over but the
shouting.