Clinton Campaign Takes a Turn For the Creepy

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out. Hillary Clinton, in a recent interview with the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader.

While it's always unsettling to watch a personality fragment into a million shards right out in public view, I admit that I've become fascinated about Hillary's future possibilities. Not about winning the nomination, which I don't think can happen. No - fascinated by the prospect of what she might say next. This one was a lulu, the best yet. She was warming up with her description of her backers as "ordinary working voters, white voters." And the one about Barack not being a Muslim "as far as she knew." Those were good, and by good, I mean sick.

But this was completely deranged. She apologized within a couple of hours (to the Kennedys, actually), but her apology didn't make any sense. How could it?
Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee says she was only referring to her husband and Kennedy “as historical examples of the nominating process going well into the summer.” Well, sure. In fact, if you wanted to find examples of the nominating process going well into the third or fourth round of voting at the convention, a little superficial historical research will do the trick. But look at what Hillary actually said and you'll see that's not what she had in mind.

In June, 1968, Bobby Kennedy, another charismatic political superstar, had just won the California primary and was poised to win the Democratic nomination as its presidential candidate. He had beaten back the insurgent campaign of Eugene McCarthy. He would take on the wily Nixon in the general election and restore Camelot to the White House, all within five years of losing the first Kennedy to an assassin's bullet. And then in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian gunman, blows the dream away.

It's astounding that all these years after Sigmund Freud did his groundbreaking work in the field of the unconscious, we are still so slavishly literal in our interpretation of what people say and mean. Dick Durbin, for example, Barack's Senate colleague and backer, defended Hillary by saying she and Barack are "good friends" and she would never wish him any harm. Umm-hmm. Never, huh? If you want to understand what Hillary meant, break her statement down into two categories:

1. Bill had not clinched the nomination until June, 1992, in the California primary.
2. Bobby Kennedy won the California primary, but not the nomination in June, 1968. The political thinking was that he had knocked McCarthy out of the race, setting up a one-on-one against Hubert Humphrey (whom he defeated in California) at the convention.

Hillary is talking about what's behind Door Number 2. Barack's got the momentum, the magic, the flow of history moving his way. He's young, he's talented and he's charismatic. He's a lot like Bobby Kennedy, in other words (Barack is actually older than Bobby was in 1968). People like believing in Barack for the same reason they liked the Kennedys: because he makes them feel like there are fresh possibilities in this tired, oppressed land, however nebulous and inchoate those "ideas" are (and they're very nebulous and inchoate). How do you beat that? Hillary has the racists and the white women over 50 as her key demographics; that's it. Obama has everything else. She needs a miracle.

Hillary's quest for this nomination borders on (hell, is) obsession. Where it came from is anyone's guess, but my thinking is that she feels victimized by talented, charming smoothies who get what they want because people (including young women) fall all over themselves to give it to them. She's endured this marriage to a womanizer who humiliated her at every turn by lavishing his attention on women who never approached her own levels of educational, professional and intellectual accomplishment. She endures it all, lives the lie, even moves to New York so she can be a Senator so she can be the President. And she won't be a weak, compromising, whimpering Mama's boy President like Bubba. She'll be a ball-buster and vindicate suppressed women everywhere. She's smarter than he is, more resourceful, tougher in the clinches. Afraid of nothing. It's all lined up. The payoff at last.

And then this...this...black guy from Illinois, with his "pretty speeches" and tall, lean body strolls to center stage, wins a long string of early primaries trading on his charms, and she's back in the shadow again. How can this keep happening to me? I'm so much better! So, you know...under stress and anxiety, and the mounting millions in personal debt, the fatigue of nonstop campaigning -- things slip out, like a memory of sniper fire in Bosnia that never happened, or conscious expression of an unconscious wish. She's just reminding us that anything can happen. She's counting on that.