Lakers 4, Jazz 2... but IT'S NOT OVER!
First of all, in late February (after 12 straight Clinton losses) we heard this: "She must win comfortably in Ohio and Texas or it's over." Who said it? Bill Clinton. What happened on March 4? Ohio, check. Texas... a draw. So at that point, they had to ignore the mathematical reasoning, but this lady started singing.... 2 and 1/2 months ago.
I know, I know. She had to stay in the race in hopes of a major slip or a ground-shaking revelation from Obama's closet. Indeed, a certain Chicago minister jumped right out, and the media gladly pranced him around. But in the end, it wasn't enough. The attempts to pull out a few more distractions from Obama's former colleague's uncle's board member's cousin's closet didn't work either.
Fine. Enough already? No, now she's claiming a lead in the popular vote? Even while counting the exhibition rounds in Michigan and Florida, that's still debatable.
If people are buying this, then Utah Jazz head coach Jerry Sloan should hire Clinton to plead his case for victory. Despite the fact that the Lakers just won their playoff series with Utah 4-2, how can we ignore the October 23 pre-season game between the two teams? The Jazz beat the Lakers in that game rather convincingly - 102-81. Never mind the fact that both teams previously agreed that the game would not count. Never mind the great number of Laker fans who stayed home because they knew the game didn't count. Never mind the Lakers rested Kobe Bryant and other starters to get ready for the games that really did count. The ticket stubs held by these deserving fans should mean something!
And on top of that, Utah beat Detroit by 15 on October 12. What about that? Never mind the fact that L.A. wasn't even a participant in this game. The experience by the fans (in Michigan, no less) was no less real. Utah, by Hillary's logic, this is still anybody's series!
My favorite assessment of the situation came from an independent outsider. I always like conservative Washington Post columnist George Will's take on things, because he compares them to something I can relate to - baseball.
Part of his May 8 column:
Hillary Clinton, 60, Illinois native and Arkansas lawyer, became, retroactively, a lifelong Yankee fan at age 52 when, shopping for a U.S. Senate seat, she adopted New York state as home sweet home. She may think, or at least would argue, that when she was 12 her Yankees really won the 1960 World Series, by standards of "fairness," because they trounced the Pirates in runs scored, 55-27, over seven games, so there.
Unfortunately, baseball's rules -- pesky nuisances, rules -- say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up.
After Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton, the Yankee Clipperette, can, and hence eventually will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem, or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party's rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's Zip code.
Or perhaps she wins if Obama's popular vote total is, well, adjusted by counting each African American vote as only three-fifths of a vote. There is precedent, of sorts, for that arithmetic (see the Constitution, Article I, Section 2, before the 14th Amendment).
"We," says George Gavin, a Clinton strategist who possesses the audacity of hopelessness required in that role, "don't think this is just going to be about some numerical metric." Mere numbers? Heaven forfend. That is how people speak when numerical metrics -- numbers of popular votes and delegates -- are inconvenient...
And from Sunday's column:
Women, we are told by some people who say they know them, are not amused. Women, or at least those whose consciousnesses have been properly raised, supposedly think that the impatience being expressed about the protracted futility of Hillary Clinton's campaign is disrespectful. They say that if the roles were reversed -- if Barack Obama's delegate arithmetic were as hopeless as hers -- people would not be so insensitive as to try to hurry a man off the stage...
In America, however, nothing ages as fast as novelty, and efforts to encourage Clinton to pack it in are heartening evidence that the novelty has worn off: The female candidate is like all other candidates. This is what equality looks like -- life as an equal-opportunity dispenser of disappointments.
When, in 1975, Frank Robinson became major league baseball's first African American manager, with the Cleveland Indians, that was an important milestone. But an even more important one came two years later, when the Indians fired him. That was real equality: Losing one's job is part of the job description of major league managers, because sacking the manager is one of the few changes a floundering team can make immediately. So, in a sense, Robinson had not really arrived until he was told to leave. Then he was just like hundreds of managers before him...
If you look at what happened at Notre Dame and what is now happening at Washington, this point could also be oh-so-appropriately applied to a certain college football coach. But I guess I've said enough about that, so I'll spare you any more shenanigans.
ROC- HRC checking in...Don't think for even a minute that just because Obama has enough "pledged" delegates that this is over. I AM COMING TO DENVER...AND NOT JUST TO SEE YOU!
I am the best candidate and i know some of these folks will come around to my team. (and change their pledge...maybe even donate!!!)
ON to other things-- Really all that matters is the next Cold Play release... everyday i come to beyellow.org to energize me.
Keep the faith.
HRC
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