Tail End of an Angry Dog

All right, so perhaps there is something about where this campaign's been going of late as identified by Fake Steve:

I guess I never realized this. But 80% of the people I talked to today I'm sure do not read a newspaper on a regular basis. Furthermore, many of them could not read a newspaper and comprehend the meaning of the stories. I don't mean that they're illiterate. They could probably read most of the words, as long as they didn't have more than three syllables. What I mean is they could not really understand what the stories mean. Also, I doubt most of them could focus long enough to finish an entire newspaper article.

And yet they vote. This terrifies me.

Actually, it's a view of middle America sadly popular over here in gleefully condescending Europe too, and although amusing it hardly rings as definitive. Instead, I'll turn to another liberal doyenne whose metaphor seems a touch more haunting:

It’s hard to believe that this Hillary is the same Wellesley girl who said she yearned for a more “ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.” What would that young Hillary — who volunteered on Gene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign; who cried the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; who referred to some of her “smorgasbord of personalities” in a 1967 letter to a friend as an “alienated academic,” and an “involved pseudo-hippie”; who once returned a bottle of perfume after feeling guilty about the poverty around her — think of this shape-shifting, cynical Hillary?

She’s so at odds with who she used to be, even in the Senate, that if she were to get elected, who would voters be electing?

Obama is like her idealistic, somewhat naïve self before the world launched 1,000 attacks against her, turning her into the hard-bitten, driven politician who has launched 1,000 attacks against Obama.

As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly, it’s as though she’s crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence.

As for my own reaction to Indiana and North Carolina last night – or indeed the next morning over here – it's at least something Clinton didn't win them both. Ever since her resurgence in Ohio and into Pennsylvania I've been getting a bad feeling about this. Let's hope I'm wrong again!

It's just painfully obvious that all she needs to win is a single vote: Barack Obama's concession. The convention is still so long away and the race, no matter what now, helplessly deadlocked. Clinton's shown all the merciless determination. Worse yet, my gut feeling is that she'd be continuity president even above the overlooked recurring Republican rebel McCain.