Old Memes Die Hard

I had an assumption about the 2008 presidential election once: that it would be a coronational processional from start to finish for Hillary Rodham....Clinton.  So did most everybody else.  It was all a formality, an inevitability.  I've been saying it ever since she took delivery of her gift-wrapped Senate seat seven years ago.  She would be unopposed for the Democrat presidential nomination, bury whatever poor sad sack Republican was flopped on the altar of electoral burnt offering, crown herself next January, sit on her throne and rule forever.

Eventually I had to modify that assumption because Barack Hussein Obama emerged as a bona fide challenger for the Donks' top spot.  Obviously after BO started winning caucus and primary contests, the meme of Queen Mean's triumphal entry had to evolve.  The coronational processional had become the steel cage match - literally.

But while her path to the throne had changed, the core of my meme remainded: however she got there, whatever it took, Hillary Rodham....Clinton was going to be the next president of the United States.  I lived under La Clinton Nostra for eight long, dark years.  I learned LCN's bitter lessons:  that the conventional rules of politics (to say nothing of the rule of law itself) do not apply to Bill and Hillary; that for them, everybody his his or her price, and any who don't will "pay" exorbitantly themselves; and that while they are the kiss of death to anybody else for whom they campaign, the Clintons themselves do...not...EVER...lose.

I came to terms with that reality years and years ago.  But evidently most other experts and observers have forgotten, because a new conventional wisdom became entrenched in place of the old one: that Hillary was "beaten," "finished," "done," and should get out of False Messiah's way.

Every time I read or heard somebody express those sentiments, I amazedly shook my head.  Do these people not remember who the Clintons are?  Who and what Hillary is?  That they still own the Democrat party lock, stock, and French tickler?  And that the only way anybody will take it away from them, much less deny a triumphal return to the White House to Her Nib, would be over their dead bodies - and what they would recapture would be reduced to ashes and debris?

Then came Our Mr. Hussein's six weeks of self-inflicted hell.  His NAFTA double-talk with Canadian officials, his Tony Rezko ties, the Jeremiah Wright flap, his long dalliance with two unrepentent Weathermen terrorists....

Heck, take a look/listen at William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn for yourself:

By rights, each of these videos should open or close with, "I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message."  Because, of course, he does, and he can't understand why anybody would object to anything his Weathermen friends, or Uncle Jerry would say - even as he claims to disagree with them out the other side of his mouth, then whines that it's all "irrelevant diversions" from his messianic mission to "change" America (into "North Cuba").

He didn't think these radical associations mattered.  Neither did the swooning, slobbering, precum-leaking, kneepad-wearing Enemy Media, who used to reserve such fawning journalistic gully-yodeling for...the Clintons.  They also didn't think they should matter to Pennsylvanians - you know, those gun-totin', wetback-deportin', queer-hating, snake-handling neanderthals, according to Senator Obama, who wouldn't be so primitive, backward, and mentally disease-ridden if they'd muster the sense to vote for the party that can legislate Utopia itself if "given" enough of our money (and liberty, and freedom, and rights, etc.).  And if the Empress did manage to eke out a campaign-saving keystone state win, well, it wouldn't matter, because she "can't win" anyway.

Tuesday, April 22 thus became a telling barometer of the updated state of the Donk race.  After BO's six weeks of hell, would he win anyway, confirming his inevitability?  Or would his obvious feet of clay get smashed and bring the Sainted One crashing back down to Terra Firma?

We got our answer.  Far from failing to deliver a "knockout blow," Obama himself absorbed an ass-whipping.  Now whether this will prove to be a turning point will be determined in Indiana and North Carolina, the next stops on this on-rolling knife fight, but surely those "experts" who had had Mrs. Clinton's life-long ambitions of world domination toe-tagged would have to modify their meme, right?

Nope and nope.

It puts me in an awfully confusing position, really.  I've always considered the spectre of President Rodham to be the ultimate political nightmare.  Of course, I behold Obama and McCain presidencies the exact same way.  I'd love to be able to join in the premature celebration of the Wicked Witch of the West Wing's political demise.  I'd love a miracle that would set all three of them adrift in favor of hitting the re-set button and putting up a genuine Republican I could whole-heartedly support.

It isn't for any softening of my unflagging Clintophobia that I don't drink the Obama Inevitability Kool-Aid.  Perhaps ingrained contrarianism and meme-investment are minor factors [*AHEM*] but at the point where the cheese binds, I just do not believe that La Clinton Nostra can be beaten - and certainly not by a Marxist-Leninist greenhorn like False Messiah.  I don't care what the pledged delegate count is.

As I've been saying for the months now, it's all about the super-duper-delegates.  And as I predicted, they are hedging their bets:

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a super delegate for the Democratic Party, told Cybercast News Service on Tuesday she would not rule out casting her vote for a nominee who does not win the popular vote. That could bode well for Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in her presidential nominee race against Senator Barack Obama (D-IL).

"I wouldn't necessarily rule it out, because you have two big states that aren't being counted," Feinstein told Cybercast News Service in reference to Michigan and Florida, where primaries that were held in January are not being counted because they violated Democratic party primary-scheduling rules.

"It's premature to say what I would or wouldn't do, but I don't rule out anything. Every super delegate can use his or her own judgment, because they are not pledged to their state."

If Barack Hussein Obama were truly "inevitable," would a comparatively respected Democrat like DiFi be keeping her options open?  She can read the tea leaves as well as the rest of us.  She can look at the past month-plus that her Illinois colleague has endured and the ballot box results it produced, and then project that ahead to the fall:

This sense of entitlement is so large among the Obama backers that it has created a gravitational force pulling in the media, which in turn reinforces the anger among Obama voters at the Clintons.  "We have already won," they are thinking.  "Why is she doing this?"

[T]he superdelegates must know the score, but they also see this MSM-constructed, enormous sense of entitlement among the Obama supporters.  These supporters will be outraged if the nomination is "stolen" from Obama, even though Hillary is beating him again and again and his underlying numbers show a very weak candidate in the fall....

The only way Hillary can overcome the force of self-preservation that is operating among the superdelegates is to argue to them that Obama will lead to down ticket disaster, taking many of the superdelegates who are electeds with him, and losing a rare chance at significant pick-ups in the Senate.  She hasn't made that argument yet, at least in public, but watch that space.  The superdelegates she needs need more than an argument that she matches up better with McCain, or that Obama will surely lose.

Of course, I don't buy that argument, either.  McCain is going to lose worse than Goldwater did the year I was born no matter which Donk is nominated.  But perception is, as the saying goes, nine-tenths of reality, and nobody can wield the hammer like La Clinton Nostra.  Just the threat of the hideous revenge she'll exact once she's back in the Oval Office on those whose blind faith in her Supreme Leadership failed her will be enough to "turn the tide."

Killing the old meme might take a bit longer though.  After all, it's not as though Dick Morris is on the Clintons' Winter Holiday card list as it is....

UPDATE: More bet-hedging:

ABC News' Jonathan Greenberger and Teddy Davis Report: In an interview set to appear in Saturday's Financial Times, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean says that he thinks the Democratic race for president will come down to superdelegates' perception of electability.

"I think the race is going to come down to the perception in the last six or eight races of who the best opponent for McCain will be. I do not think in the long run it will come down to the popular vote or anything else," said Dean.

Dean added that he thinks it is "very unlikely" that the superdelegates will elevate a candidate who is trailing in pledged delegates and the popular vote before adding that "it is possible" and that superdelegates have "every right to do it."

I'm telling ya, it's False Messiah who should be worried about being dealt a "knockout blow" - particularly from a woman who has richly earned her status as the "dirtiest player in the game."