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.