President Election Odds: Hillary Clinton and the Temple of Doom

US Politics / Chicken Dinner / 08 May 2008 / Leave a Comment

Only a miracle can win Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination now, say Chicken Dinner...

Poor Hillary Clinton - she's swilled all that beer in an attempt to recast herself as the friend of the working man, and at the beginning of the week had even closed the gap on Barack Obama on the Real Clear Politics average of polls to as little as 0.2%, but following Tuesday's primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, she woke up to some pretty dispiriting headlines. "Obama almost certain to be nominee", says ABC News. "Options dwindling for Clinton", says the New York Times. "Clinton on the edge as she fails to pull off double win," says the Guardian. "The Nominee", announced Drudge, beneath a photo of her rival. Have we finally seen the last of the butterscotch pantsuit? Not quite, but nearly, say Betfair punters, who have have backed Obama down to [1.15] to win the Democratic nomination. Hillary, at [9.0], is drifting up an unpleasant smelling creek with no apparent means of propulsion.

While only her most fanatical supporters, the kind who wear campaign stickers on their faces, expected her to win in North Carolina, her razor-thin victory in Indiana was not emphatic enough to provide fresh impetus to her campaign. Indiana has plenty of the kind of people who Clinton considers her natural constituency, the white, the rural, the blue-collar, and what are kindly described as "low education voters." Yet she needed to win by a mile, and didn't.

According to ABC news, "You notice as she campaigns that she drops the ending of words, and becomes 'We're working people,'" said Peri Arnold, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. "She becomes sort of Rosie-on-the-night-shift and stylistically she becomes very attractive to these voters." Obviously not attractive enough, though, or perhaps it was just stretching the imagination a little too far, that the wife of a former president, with whom she has made over $100 million since he left office in 2000, would actually be much more at home driving a beer truck or making ball bearings.

So if playing proletarian dress-up didn't work, what ideas are left in her strategy box? With virtually the entire American pundit class declaring the race over, three choices remain: give up now, wait to lose officially at the convention in August or come up with an idea so brilliant and unexpected that even the second coming is going to feel lame by comparison.

Michael Tomasky writing in the Guardian suggests she could "go nuclear on Florida and Michigan" to reclaim the delegates currently barred from those states as punishment for sneaking higher up the voting calendar, but it's going to need something bigger than that.

He also suggests that Clinton is so mentally locked into the dream of winning that she is incapable of withdrawing. " She - and Bill, and Chelsea, and most of the people around them - surely can't believe that she's about to lose the Democratic nomination. There was supposed to be no question about her winning it. There's reason to think they won't stop until the door is closed and triple-locked and boarded and sealed shut around the edges with rubber cement."

Which at least would buy her time for that miracle to happen. Because all streaks must end, and America hasn't assassinated an inspirational black leader for a quite a while now.