Life is cruel. Politics is crueler. But perhaps the cruelest: the irony of failure via the certitude of success.
If you're a regular reader of this column you probably noticed that for some time I have written under the presumption of Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee. Some have seen this as jumping the gun -- that all is not yet doom for Hillary Clinton, and there are yet decisive dramas to be played out, today, in two weeks, and in two months. So be patient, these some have advised or scolded.
But, if I may: It wasn't I who jumped the gun. It was Clinton.
For too long, and way too early, she was absolutely sure of prevailing in the primary season, for who would successfully challenge the all-powerful and party-loved Clintons? She would flick away internal opposition like so many gnats -- "It will," as she commanded last year, "be all over by Feb. 5th " -- so the selection process was a mere warm-up. The only real work would be in the general.
Nowhere was this more evident than in two incurable miscalculations hatched and executed as supreme cleverness: the tragic one of her Iraq war vote and the relatedly foolish one of her schmoozing with the conservative media. Both, as we and she now know, came back to bite her in the derrière.
By now, the Iraq vote speaks for itself. Its nakedness as a cynical, general-election, tough-on-national-security ploy is seen clearly by all but hurriedly shoved aside by the Clinton camp with the briefest and most farcical of justifications. The best one can say in Hillary's defense is that she didn't plan on the war turning out this way. The worst, however, goes to her judgment as would-be commander in chief: wars never turn out the way one planned, and she should have known that.
But she couldn't be troubled at the time. Hillary was in a hurry to a general election.
And part and parcel of her Iraq strategy was, as the Politco reminds us, this: "Over the course of her six years as a New York senator and in the early days of her presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton cultivated an unlikely set of allies: the conservative media."
"From Rupert Murdoch" -- who contributed $2,300 to her presidential campaign -- "to David Brooks" -- who wrote fawningly last February that when "most liberals went into full opposition" against Bush on Iraq, Clinton "tried to stay constructive" -- "to Matt Drudge" -- who, wrote New York magazine, "seems obsessed with making Hillary Clinton our next president" -- the opinion-shaping right and far right were engaged in an intricate dance with Hillary, and it was she doing the leading.
Hillary didn't worry about blowback from the left. She already had the nomination sewn up, remember? And what blowback did erupt from her courtship of the right -- which, by the way, never equaled the Clinton-manufactured outrage over Obama's singular "Reagan" comments -- was treated as a mere and passing nuisance. Let them eat their fretting little cake. Hillary was thinking big thoughts, orchestrating grand alliances and confidently running a general campaign.
That was then, when "if the conservative base hated her, many members of the conservative elite did not." And they did not, at the time, because she was still hanging with the best of the warhawks, hawking this turkey of a war.
But then, to make a really long story quite short, the war went a bit sour; true to poll-testing form, Hillary became a dove -- and just in time for Iowa. And with that, the "conservative elite" peeled off, en masse. Murdoch "repudiated her," Drudge "rode her decline as gleefully as [he] watched her rise and the pundit class moved from its grudging respect for Clinton into an infatuation with Obama."
At the core of Hillary's seemingly sudden problem was the lack of one -- of a core, that is. It became evident to both right and left that she possessed no real philosophical grounding, that she would blow with whatever the prevailing winds. Given enough time in any primary process, this trait, this quality, this personal characteristic is what is bound to prevail in the public mind. And finally, it did.
Yet Hillary Clinton had given little thought to the primary process; it was all to have been over two weeks ago today. Instead, she played the right and took progressive support for granted. She ran a general campaign from the get-go, because she was absolutely certain of interim success -- a success that is now virtually unreachable.
No, it wasn't I who jumped the gun. It was Clinton. Nevertheless she was off by only a month. Come March 5, it really will be over.