Not So Super Anymore

Apparently Hillary Clinton keeps a picture that she took with Barack Obama and his family inside her Senate office. She sees her rival whenever she goes to work. I'm sure that sometimes, when she sees his smiling gaze with his picture-perfect family, she can't help but think to herself, "How did you pull this off?"

She was it. Presidential campaigns are about the farce of a race and the reality of a coronation. She was the heir to the Democratic throne, the inevitable nominee; it was she who would be the agent which would bring about the Clinton restoration.

But something happened in December. The young, charismatic, inexperienced novice from Illinois, the son of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, was causing a stir. Iowans—those semi-mythical citizens who've been delegated the responsibility of choosing an early leader, an early winner—opened up their hearts and listened to his message, and de-humanized him. Barack Obama is no longer a candidate but a movement.

He won in Iowa showing that a Black man could win in a white state. And that opened up the floodgates. The press, long messenger-boys for the Clintons, saw an opening and took it. They wrote her obituary and killed her candidacy. They said that Barack was unstoppable. They said that Barack was inevitable. They said that Hillary would be humiliated in New Hampshire…and then she cried.

And New Hampshire made her the second-coming of the "Comeback Kid." (The first "Comeback Kid" actually placed second in 1992.) And everyone again fell back in line. Obama was done.

But it didn't happen that way. She wins Nevada. He wins South Carolina. But Bill Clinton says that Jesse Jackson also won there. And now there's a split. She's not winning everything she's supposed to, he's winning things he's not. So they put her on a plane to accept an award that's made up ad hoc: The winner of the Florida Democratic Primary.

And Super Tuesday was supposed to be Super indeed. For the Republicans it was. John McCain defeated Mitt Romney but created the ascendancy of Mike Huckabee to prevent, however futile, the inevitability of a McCain nomination. For the Democrats it wasn't a Super night for either. It was a tie. Only 50,000 votes out of the approximately 15 million cast separated the two. And when it comes to the delegates, we have no winner. It's February and the race is too-close-to-call.

So on the morning after the night in which nothing happened, news broke that she had lent her campaign $5 million. Obama's campaign countered with the fact that they had raised almost as much in the 24-hours since Super Stalemate. And then the reasons for the media leak became clear. The Clinton ship wasn't sinking. It had not hit an iceberg, it was a tactical move created by the Clinton campaign to get her rank-and-file donor base to come out and salvage an effort that didn't need saving. At the end it was nothing more than a cheap political trick to fundraise millions of dollars, almost double the amount of the original loan, in a short time-span. She's the girl who cried wolf.

So the tie continues. Obama swept the primaries this weekend and is expected to perform strongly in the Potomac Primary this month. This will be Obama's month. But the delegate count remains razor-thin.

So thin in fact that both campaigns are using surrogates to make sure that the so-called "Super Delegates"—elected officials, party members—stay in line. Clinton is using Bill and Chelsea (prompting a reporter from MSNBC to state that the Clinton campaign has "pimped" her out; the reporter is now indefinitely suspended).

And the question will finally be will these Super Delegates go against the voice of the people, even though none exists? Democrats are tied. It is a house divided. Further division won't bode well once the nominee finally gets selected in Denver this summer after the acrimony witnessed this winter and spring.

Now both are trying to play this tired game of lowering expectations. Clinton's campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, a Latina was replaced with Maggie Williams, a Black woman. Clinton is saying that Obama is the frontrunner; Obama is saying that Clinton is. They do this so that when inevitably one of them wins, they'll be able to say that against the odds they did so, making their quest that much nobler, that much more extraordinary.

Obama is becoming the establishment. I guess it's about time he did. He now has a real, honest-to-God chance in taking this.

All elections are about change. It's as simple as that. Clinton could never overcome that she is more-of-the-same. The tactics that she's used are straight out of negative political playbooks. She tried to defeat her nemesis but she hasn't been able to. And this doesn't happen to a front-runner. Now Obama's leading in delegates and leading in money. But she'll stay in until the end. Peggy Noonan asked if she could lose with grace? I don't see Howard Dean being strong enough to push her to the curb. I see her fighting this until the very end, until the very last casualty, until the very last blood has been spilt. She might really lose this, and the sudden defeat of a Clinton was something that no one could have predicted.

A message of hope and "yes we can" beat out a message of thirty-five years of experience. As Obama likes to bring up—the wrong kind of experience. And it's ironic that Obama is winning this running as Clinton in '92.

The super-delegates have to give this to Obama. It's seemingly the end of the Clinton effort. He's even making the sage argument of electability now. The Republican playbook, the worst-kept secret in Washington, has been filled page-by-page with ways to defeat Hillary. Now it has to be re-written with Obama.

Tuesday showed us that there was no evident winner, but there is a loser, and that loser is Hillary Clinton. She's losing her stranglehold on what was once thought of as a fait accompli. She's losing her grip on something that she thought was rightfully hers.