Hillary's Bitter Victory

Zero hour, the night of the excruciating Pennsylvania primary. I'm in the ballroom of the Park Hyatt hotel in Philadelphia, site of Hillary Clinton's victory speech. The place is going nuts. The floor is a teeming mass of celebrating Lifetime demographic; I haven't seen this many strong, independent women in one place since [potentially offensive gender-specific content self-censored by writer]. Clinton, who has just kicked Obama's ass all over the state, is onstage spooning out her rap.

"You know, for me, the victory we share tonight is deeply personal," Hillary says. "It was here in Pennsylvania where my grandfather started work as a boy in the lace mills. . . ."

"Really?" I say from my perch in the press balcony, nudging an HBO producer next to me. "Her grandfather worked in a lace mill? I hadn't heard that!"

"Yeah, right?" she says, laughing. "Who knew?"

But I'm catching stares now from a camera woman kneeling a few feet in front. "You clap at these things," she snaps at us. "That's what you do at these things. You clap. You should be clapping!"

I clap quietly to calm her down, sighing once she turns around. In the past, the press areas at campaign stops have always been wisecracking oases, a place where the rules of partisan politics are largely suspended. After all, this job is hard enough without having to take the subject matter seriously. But as the Obama-Clinton race has devolved into one of the all-time political death matches, the Hutu-Tutsi thing has spread even into the reporter ranks. Now, even one wrong word on the press bus can start a fight.

It's the same way with Democrats everywhere now. Seldom in American politics has the same side of a single party split into such distinct and acrimonious factions. As virtually identical as the two candidates are in their political positions, there is no longer any common cause left between Hillary lovers and Obama supporters. There is only a culture war of epic proportions, featuring some of the most unlikely and absurd combatants in the history of impassioned conflict. Ordinary suburban Americans, people who consider Tina Fey biting satire and whose only "fighting" experience has usually been against trans fats or hair loss, can now be seen running through the streets, screaming war calls like Maoist guerrillas in the jungles of Nepal.

As Hillary finishes her speech in the ballroom, plumes of confetti shoot into the air out of a pair of paper-cannons. The loudspeaker — which for hours now has been playing an agonizing loop of patriotic classic rock, with heavy emphasis on Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" — is now blasting John Cougar Mellencamp's "Our Country."

I raise an eyebrow. The song is (1) the soundtrack to a hideously overplayed truck commercial and (2) possibly, just possibly, a weird and weirdly gratuitous dig at Obama, who at that very moment was making his gloomy "I'm fucked" concession speech in Evansville, Indiana, flanked by Indiana native Mellencamp and his wife, Elaine. Is the Clinton camp trying to make a joke about the fact that Obama is grasping for the endorsement of some gnomish Eighties B-lister while Hillary is grabbing America by the balls? Yeah, this is our country, motherfucker! Suck on this!

Has it come to this? The political equivalent of "I know you are, but what am I?" On both sides, this Obama-Clinton race has turned into something very like the vicious rivalry of a pair of blood-lusting high school student bodies — Odessa Permian versus Midland Lee, only with the fate of the free world hanging in the balance.

This race has already seen such juvenilia as one would previously have considered inconceivable in a contest between two ostensibly cerebral Democratic presidential candidates, including a surprisingly serious argument over which camp had the right to invoke Rocky references in their Pennsylvania campaign rhetoric — an argument settled, amazingly, when Gov. Ed Rendell declared "by executive order" that the right was Hillary's alone. The problem has been exacerbated by the relatively minor policy differences between the two candidates, although one suspects that even if those differences were major, they would take a back seat to the emerging tribal schism now cleaving the Democratic Party — a wholesale regression to clashing teenage emotions that turns these supposedly profound electoral battles into feverish squalls of car-honking and sarcastic sloganeering.

How long before one side kidnaps the other side's mascot? Will we wake up some morning in the near future and find Obama's campaign bus taken apart and reassembled on the roof of the Indiana Statehouse? Will Obama hooligans steal Hillary's Botox kit and gleefully paint the word "suck!" at the end of every yes she can sign in Guam?

More important, when will this thing end? Is there any relief in sight?