Take Hillary Clinton’s word on this much: She intends to fight all the way to the convention.
Why? Either she’s onto something or she’s craps-shooting.
Not likely the latter. With all the money — hers, Bill’s and others’ — that the Clintons have sunk over the decades into her becoming the first woman president, she’s not willingly going to crap out this close to the jackpot.
No, Hillary knows something — or has convinced herself she knows something — something so big, so God-awful, so irreversibly devastating to Barack Obama’s campaign that enough of those delegates, super and not-so-super, will come hopping to her like fleas abandoning a dead dog’s back.
Artful as Hillary is in making stuff up, even she couldn’t fabricate out of nothing a whopper immense enough to blow Obama clear out of the water. So, whatever that whopping something is, it has to come from somewhere.
Only two such somewheres exist:
1. Somewhere in Hillary’s political hope chest of last resort.And don’t think the Clintons, with all their available assets — both in hand and uncollected — haven’t been beating the bushes, scouring the records and sniffing the bottom of closets hoping to come across just such a treasure trove of unmentionable ammo to lay down a fatal fusillade in Obama’s direction.
If they have unearthed such a prize super-truffle, why haven’t they sprung it out in the open yet?
Answer: Either it’s not smelly enough, or they still haven’t nailed it down on all four corners.
So, what’s left in Hillary’s cupboard? Hope is about all: hope that something does exist out here, hope that her road warriors will be able to scrape up this carrion while it’s still putrid enough to stink up the whole stadium.
2. Somewhere in Obama’s murky past.And a potentially rich, happy hunting-ground that must be. In contrast, how could there be anything left about the Clintons to which this nation hasn’t already been treated? Obama’s past, however, remains largely a closed book, with but a few unseemly passages peeked at by the not-so-nosey newsies.
Is there something lurking in those unexplored episodes of “Life and Times of the All-American Family Obama” that Hillary’s sniffers haven’t sniffed? If so, and if it’s damning enough, it most likely has been hidden . . . deep, deep down. Or Hillary would have by now come up with it, bug-eyed and beaming.
No, there’s nothing in Obama’s past worth dragging out and rolling her shoulder in; or there is, and there’s a good reason she hasn’t produced it.
If that’s so, then it’s because she hasn’t yet sunk her talons into it.
Then, what is it that Hillary is still waiting for?
Could it be she really does know what’s there, and is shrewdly waiting for it to hatch on its own — a horrendous Jurassic raptor, bursting forth upon the political landscape, freed at last from its gigantic egg shell.
You know, the kind of nightmare revelation that would send those Obama delegates fleeing for their courageous, principled lives. The kind of ugly beast that would gag even Obama. The monster it would be unnecessary for him to demur sanctimoniously that he could ever disown, for it would have his family name emblazoned all over it.
That’s the magnitude of H-bomb Hillary would need to reverse current history and plop the presidential nomination neatly in her apron, sending Obama back to wherever he came from, wondering what on earth hit him.
Perhaps she’s playing a forlorn game of, “Please, God, intervene and save my bacon. Surprise me.” Not likely, not Hillary Clinton.
A good bet is she knows something the rest of us don’t, or she imagines she does.
John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for Newsmax.com.
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