In writing off Hillary Clinton, no one tops George Will

Columnist George Will channeled his inner William Faulkner in reflecting on the dire straits Hillary Clinton faces in her pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination.

Pundits galore wrote words aplenty today on the same topic, but no others did so in a sentence (yes, a la Faulkner, a single twisting sentence) as audicious as the one produced by the erudite Will. We commend it to your attention, forthwith:

After Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton, the Yankee Clipperette, can, and hence eventually will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem,** or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party's rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's Zip code.

The rest of the piece can be read here.

-- Don Frederick

** A theorem stating that the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ has no solution if a, b, and c are positive integers and if n is an integer greater than 2.

Photo credit: ABC

Comments

[MissClarity]

All said, can you believe that the Clinton puppet, ABC, is planting the seeds of a Obama/Clinton (hurts just to write it) ticket. Isn't there a court case pending on the SLAPP scheduled after the November elections and wouldn't Obama being setting himself up for further Clinton former candiidate supporters/workers who have been dupt into jail because of manipulations of the "Oh I didn't know about it" Clinton machine. She was kicked off the Watergate investigation committee (history predicts the future) for larceny or was is fraud or ________ fill in theblank. Obama isn't stupid just because he's always kind and gracious.

[david mangan]

A Republican pol neighbor who was FL state rep four X remarked to me that Obama's health plan was actually more conservative than Hillary's & that Obama may be a centrist Democrat masquerading as an ultra-lib.

Yeah, he's easy to listen to, but are we going to have Omarosa as the First Lady? Ugh!

[Marks]

At a Hillary campaign stop in West Virginia, Bill should join her on the stage, whisper in her ear " Let's get out of here" and lead her away. The campaign stops without a big send off or any other comment, that she's quitting.

She can't quit, her mind won't let her. YES people around her at her beck and call won't do anything to stop her.

Hillary's comments in USA Today have put the end to her campaign. She said things change in a day with politics, they have for her.

Clipped...

Mrs Clinton said: “There was just an AP article posted that found how Senator Obama's support among hard-working Americans, white Americans is weakening again and how the whites in both states [North Carolina and Indiana] who had not completed college were supporting me.”

On Wednesday, Geoff Garin, her chief strategist, trumpeted the fact that exit polls showed Mrs Clinton had won white voters overwhelmingly in North Carolina.

“'When we began in North Carolina,” he said “we were running exactly even with white voters in North Carolina . . . and ended up winning a very significant win of 24 points among those voters.''

There was an ill-tempered clash between Paul Begala, a Clinton supporter, and Donna Brazile, an uncommitted super-delegate and Democratic strategist, on CNN after Mr Begala said it was not enough for Mr Obama to have the support of just “eggheads and African-Americans”.

[Donna Chaffee]

RE: George Will's tortured single sentence:

Since this is Mother's Day, perhaps Senator Clinton's daughter, Chelsea (who, at age 28, is a member of Generation X....or Y depending on how you count it), can give her Baby Boomer mother the gift of a refresher course in the "new math" of Barack Obama's new brand of politics. Or better yet, since Chelsea was a history major at Stanford, perhaps she can explain to her mom on this Mother's Day what recent political history has taught us about contested party conventions -- that the candidate coming out of a contested or divided convention usually loses the general election (remember the Republican convention of 1964, the Democratic convention of 1968, the Republican Convention of 1976, the Democratic convention of 1980.)

As for me, I'm hoping that by Father's Day, June 15th, Hillary will have enthusiastically endorsed our presumptive nominee, Barack Obama, and that we'll have a unified Democratic Party to face off (and win) against John McCain in the fall! In the meantime, I'm gonna go see if I can figure out how to play the Beach Boys' song, "Help Me, Rhonda" backwards.