It’s Groundhog Day All Over For Hillary Clinton

Like Phil Connors (Bill Murray) in the movie, Hillary Clinton wakes up every morning, forced to repeat the previous day, although not in the same place and with the same people.... Today she is off to West Virginia, where she stated "I'm staying in this race until there's a nominee."

She’s obviously not listening to the voters who has rejected her, the analysts who by now have given up on her chances or many of her own advisors, which makes her awfully similar to our current Bubble-Boy-In-Chief, George W. Bush. Like him, she seems to feel that she has been chosen for this job by some higher power than the people, and like him she finds it impossible to admit a mistake, even when it’s such a major one as authorizing George W. Bush to launch an attack on Iraq that sensible people at that time warned would end up in a disaster (Al Gore, Jr., Barack Obama, and many others.)

She knew that she lost big by not scoring big in Indiana. It might very well have been Rush Limbaugh’s republican storm troopers that gave her the less than 2 percent lead over Obama.
It was obvious from her meek voice in her speech late last night, and even more obvious in Bill Clinton’s face where he stood behind her. He didn’t exactly gloat over the minute victory…

Just past midnight, NBC’s Tim Russert blurted out the inconvenient truth:

“We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it. Those closest to her will give her a hard-headed analysis, and if they lay it all out, they’ll say: ‘What is the rationale? What do we say to the undeclared super delegates tomorrow? Why do we tell them you’re staying in the race?’ And tonight, there’s no good answer for that.”

But the next morning Hillary woke up and went back to repeating herself, continuing a campaign that she can't win. In Shepherdstown, W.Va. she told reporters "I'm staying in this race until there's a nominee."

"She is the Japanese soldier in the Pacific island that hasn't been told the war is over," Democratic pollster John Anzalone told Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza. "Occasionally she picks off a few islanders and considers it a victory. Well, yesterday she found out the war was over."

But maybe she didn’t get it. Like the Bushies, she had her reality distortion shield up, which is why she probably won’t here the news that the former senator and presidential candidate George McGovern, who is a superdelegate and a longtime friend of the Clinton’s, today asked her to drop out of the race. CNN reports that McGovern was switching his support to endorse Barack Obama. “I think mathematically the race is all but won by Barack Obama and the time has come for all of us to unite and get ready for the general election in the fall,” he said.

Or maybe her race is actually for the 2012 election. By undermining Barack Obama’s campaign, she would help John McCain win the 2008 election, making it harder for him to win the nomination battle and securing it for her self against the then incumbent president who will by then be very old and probably not very popular.

There is only one problem with this strategy, if that is what it is, and that is that Obama is a very strong candidate and that America may have moved further away from prejudice and partisanship than the Clinton’s think.

Hans Sandberg