Hillary's Bitter Victory

The short answer to this question is no, there isn't. This contest no longer has anything to do with the electoral math. After the Pennsylvania contest, Obama holds some 1,724 delegates, which include 1,488 pledged delegates and 236 superdelegates. Hillary, by contrast, has 1,593 total delegates, broken down into 1,334 pledged and 259 superdelegates.

The popular vote is a more confusing story, but even there the margin is substantial: 14,417,619 votes for Obama to 13,917,393 for Hillary. Those numbers can be skewed in several different directions, depending on one's inclinations (Obama's number is artificially low because it fails to reflect caucus-state populations; Hillary's number is artificially low because she doesn't get credit for Michigan and Florida). But either way, the final count will almost certainly favor Obama.

The fact that the race seems so closely fought now makes it hard to remember Obama's crushing streak of victories in the middle of this campaign. But the truth is that he built up so big a lead back then that even a major victory in a major state like Pennsylvania has little influence on the outcome: Hillary picked up only nine delegates on Obama in the process.

By the time the primary season officially ends on June 3rd with Montana and South Dakota, Obama will almost certainly be leading in delegates and the popular vote — but there almost certainly will be no nominee, either. The remainder of this race has therefore become a matter of each candidate making a case for his/her electability to the 300-odd superdelegates still uncommitted — people like Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, who ultimately will decide this contest at the convention.

In the meantime, one thing about this contest can be said with absolute surety: Everyone involved has lost their minds. For Clinton supporters, the race has taken on a meaning that transcends politics. One gets the sense that Hillary's campaign has become an idée fixe for any Democrat of a certain type who has ever been fucked around or disrespected or abused or disappointed. Far more than any policy position, it is Hillary's "fight to the finish" mantra that is reaching her supporters on some elemental level that is hard for outsiders to comprehend.

Her campaign has become a symbol of not giving in to those who would wish us to surrender, of defying the smug assessments of those who think they know better, of not letting someone else's diminished expectations for us — maybe those of a boss, maybe an ex-boyfriend or ex-wife, maybe a Madison Avenue ad world that tells us we have to look a certain way/age to be worth loving — rule the day. I would say that Hillary is the electoral incarnation of a Gloria Gaynor song, but Gloria Gaynor is too campy and even a little bit too black for this crowd; the vibe at Hillary events feels more like nostalgic white suburban angst, a numbing misery of a type that runs deep enough it can hear the same song over and over again in the car on the way to work for 20 consecutive years and yet still sing along to it, lips pursed defiantly in Billy Crystal's white-man's overbite, when it hears it twice, three times, even four times in the same hour. In other words, this Hillary campaign is basically Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" running for president.

If you're the kind of person who's ready to throw a chair through a window if you hear that fucking song even one more time, you're not going to get this Hillary thing. More to the point, you're not going to fit in with these crowds, which are full of featureless, angry faces, faces of the type that all us smug cleverati in the media think can be ignored, faces that have been going to boring-ass jobs every day and taking one crappy vacation a year to Puerto Vallarta and running a treadmill three times a week to help their spouses find sex with them more tolerable — you see, there we go, making jokes about them again! See, we can laugh all we want, but they won't . . . back . . . down! THEY WON'T! BACK! DOWWWWWWWN!

Somewhere in there is where you can find the emotional imperative underneath this campaign, and the reason why all the electoral math in the world doesn't mean shit to these people. Hillary calls them the "invisible Americans." There are a hell of a lot of them, and their anger is real. They don't want to hear about numbers, and they don't want to hear about Hillary bowing out for the good of the party. After Clinton's victory speech, I stop an elderly woman with orange hair who is wearing what looks like a white rayon sweater. I ask her if there would ever be a point at which she thinks Hillary should consider stepping d?

"Absolutely not!" she cries. "You never get out!"

I start to bring up the math, the delegate count?

"SHE IS GOING TO WIN!!!"

Next thing I know, this woman, in life probably someone's quiet grandmother from Lancaster County, is mugging in front of a TV camera, her hands raised in twin victory signs like Dick Nixon, shouting Hillary's name to the world.