Wake me when it's over

Democratic Party leaders are finally mobilizing to bring the long nominating contest to a close. Whether they can get Clinton to abandon her campaign is questionable: she has been talking about taking her argument over Florida and Michigan to the credentials committee. (A professor of mine used to say, "When it doubt, pack the credentials committee.") Still, if Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid lean on enough superdelegates to put Obama over the top without however many delegates from Florida and Michigan remain unseated after tomorrow's rules committee meeting, Clinton's campaign will increasingly be seen for what it has been for weeks: a sad, desperate effort driven by the candidate's ego.

What seems to be overlooked--by Clinton and most of the MSM--is the way that her campaign is both a sign and a cause of her defeat. The way in which she has consistently tried to move the goalposts, her shameless embrace of any useful tactic, the repeated "slips of the tongue" are symbolic and symptomatic of the difference between Clinton and Obama--between the same old tired politics and a transformational candidate. I suppose it's not surprising that Clinton would not realize that it was her strategy that doomed her, because there was no way that her approach to politics could compete with the message that Barack Obama personifies.