Hillary's Gaffe

I think there's been a lot of overwrought angst on the trail about Hillary's latest gaffe, her pointing out that the Democrats in 1968 didn't have a party nominee until the leading candidate was shot and killed. Olbermann was certainly overwrought, and so have others been.

Hillary Clinton doesn't want a Democrat to be president. Hillary Clinton wants Hillary Clinton to be president. If she stays in the race, she hurts her party's chances and the odds of a Democrat, even her, get smaller and smaller but they remain non-zero. If she stays in the race until the convention, she might be able to sway enough superdelegates to go her way. At that point, with only two months to go (and the Republican's own convention, complete with "convention bounce"), she'll have a non-zero chance of becoming president.

If she drops out now, she has a zero chance. And to her, a small chance is a lot better than zero chance.

I think she finally said out loud what's been obvious for a while now. I think it was a Freudian slip, and a big one, something that's been on the minds of her and her campaign staff for a while now: one of the few factors left in her calculation. She's staying in because there's a chance-- and there have been credible death threats, just go read Stormfront-- that someone will take a shot at Barack Obama. The fact that people have made credible death threats against her black opponent has to factor in to her calculations. She's staying in the race and tearing apart an entire political party because there's a chance (and chance is all she's got) the guy in the lead might get killed.

She is engaged in amoral political calculation of the worst kind. She didn't say "I hope he does" or "I wish someone would do it," she just said out loud what really shouldn't have been said, and showed that she's banking her career on it. She's not vicious or mean, she's just horribly, terribly, stupidly vain.

Speaking of Olbermann...

Speaking of Olbermann, I'm gonna call bullshit on his "Worst Person" routine last night. He cannot legitimately ridicule Hugh Hewitt for using a Bizarro analogy (from the Superman comics) when he himself has talked favorably with Matt Yglesias (creator of the Green Lantern theory of politics) and Ezra Klein (creator of the Iron Man theory of politics). If Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein are good "comic book" guys-- and that was their whole point, that the Green Lantern and Iron Man represent a better pool of common cultural knowledge for the current wonk generation than the Bible or Shakespeare-- then he cannot and should not diss Hugh Hewitt for being "a comic book guy."

(no subject)

Muse has been quiet the past week. I think the whole jury thing took a lot out of both of us... even though it was actually a shorter working day, it was so different and emotionally wracking that I didn't feel like writing all week.

But she came to me last night and said, "I have this idea..." And I listened patiently, and nodded my head as she rolled out an interesting character and an interesting situation. It's a new Sterlings story set around the same time as Polestar. I took down all the notes. It's a good arc, I thought.

"But Muse," I told her, "I don't know anything about curling."

A quick note in case you're worried...

Yes, we went to Folklife, like we did every year. We were not affected by the shooting this afternoon, although the lights and sirens certainly caught our attention.

We're all dog tired and heading to bed.