That’s what op-ed columnist David Brooks insightfully called Hillary Rodham Clinton’s refusal to recognize that the Democratic nomination is all but lost and that her campaign’s strategy of focusing on Barack Obama’s flaws and inexperience is handing the gereal election to John McCain.
Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life. Think of the thousands of staged events . . . the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head. No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic. The only question is whether Clinton herself can step outside the apparatus long enough to turn it off and withdraw voluntarily or whether she will force the rest of her party to intervene and jam the gears.