It's hard to imagine Hillary conceding to Obama. It's hard to imagine Hillary conceding to anything. The woman's tenacity is legend. I watched her campaign not so much for her message but to see what she'll do next, how she'll bounce back, what new rationale she'll invoke as her reason for staying in what all clear-thinking people saw as a lost race.
In the end, she was painful to watch, computing her odds with her own math, unflinching and deep in denial. But like a car wreck, you just can't look away.
Obama made history, but all eyes are on Hillary. We can't help it — she's makes excellent TV.
Obama's soaring speeches caused generations to time travel back to the age of Camelot, where he and Michelle could be the young king and queen to a young and still dreamy America. Obama is the stuff of Life Magazine: oozing charisma in grainy black and white.
That charisma and the internet — it's powerful alchemy.
Hillary, on the other hand, is very much about today. Reality-TV today. Bill Clinton in a brawl with a college student in YouTube today. Chelsea: None-of-your-business today. Hillary in tears, why-don't-you-like-me today. Hillary in SNL, Live from New York It's Saturday Night today.
Today, the CNN panel post mortems the car wreck that was her campaign. There is a riveting flashback of what went horribly wrong. The lost message. The Bill factor. The sniper fire story that backfired. Like Anna Nicole's descent and Britney Spears' breakdown, the collapse now looks inevitable. And cruelly entertaining.
No wonder Hillary doesn't quit. We pundits just wouldn't know how to go on.
Television has always been about high contrasts. Heroes against villains. Pros versus Cons. The powerful versus the marginalized. Rich versus poor. Doves against Hawks.
And the Hillary-Obama match made in TV heaven. For a medium largely concerned with images and sound, it could only see black versus white, man against woman, the strong but tempered voice of Obama versus the near-shrill Hillary screaming Choose Me! Choose Me!
What is life without Hillary? In a word, McCain. A man who disappears in the glare of television and is either in the shadow of Bush, or worse, behind his wife Elvira. With the entire Republican machinery solidly behind him, and with a head start of several months, the best McCain could come up with was: "That's Not Change We Can Believe In."
Huh. Dude, are you sure you want to go with that? Do you need another couple of months to think of another line?
I don't know. He survived torture in enemy hands, but I wish he had gotten more out of it than the ability to walk like a hotdog. Obama's going to cream you.
Some good will come out of this. Jon Stewart will have a field day. David Letterman and Steven Colbert, too. What we will lose in depth and heft, we will make up for with jokes. But after months of nail-biting suspense and a shifting landscape only John King could navigate with his magic board, it's becoming increasingly clear that, yes, we will be bored.
I hate Hillary and I miss her already.
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