The Superdelegates

So no more Hillary: no more Rocky references, no more Tom Petty, no more carefully orchestrated leaks of human imperfections mined deep in the anus of Barack Obama's increasingly sullied biography. No more guilt-by-association raps, no more purges of insufficiently ruthless campaign staffers, no more woe-is-me whining about media conspiracies and the "race card" and Florida and Michigan and her empty war chest — no more whining about being outspent, from a candidate who had eight years of White House chips to cash in. No more tearful "How can you do this to my mom?" phone calls to superdelegates from Chelsea Clinton, no more of a hectoring, red-faced Bill Clinton lecturing us about whatever side of his ass we forgot to kiss that day. The Clintons are finally done. They were a big draw for a long time — but I think we're all going to be surprised by just how much and how thoroughly we won't miss them once they're finally gone.

If they're finally gone, that is. For in reality, the mathematical situation after North Carolina for Hillary is bleaker than before only by degree. Her situation since about the Potomac primaries has always been hopeless, so for her to stay in this race and keep alive the possibility of some monstrous extra-democratic crisis would hardly be surprising.

Ultimately, that might be the Clintons' real legacy. Their decision to stay in the game and press on when there was no hope of winning through good old-fashioned voting may have finally institutionalized what is becoming a habit in American politics: the fight for power through lawyers and backroom maneuvering instead of votes, and the reflexive, automatic impugning of the legitimacy of the process when the process leaves you a few bits short.

When all's said and done, what may end up being most interesting about this race is that we all knew it wasn't really over, even when the voters said it was over. We've advanced to a stage of our politics where the transfer of power is no longer simply a matter of counting votes: Now we have to wait for the dust to settle, to make sure the secondary, post-election political battle reaffirms the status of the "elected" winner, and the only way we know for sure how things have turned out is to see who's actually sitting in the Oval Office at the end of the fight.

By now, we're pretty much used to this shit. In 2000, the presidency was decided by the Florida secretary of state and the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2004, we all hesitated to believe it was completely over until John Kerry decided not to sic his lawyers on the Ohio results. And in 2008, the Democratic nomination will be decided by the party's Rules and Bylaws Committee — a group of people that until this week had never been heard of by anybody at all, anywhere. On May 31st, the committee will decide whether to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida — delegates the same committee banned from the convention as punishment for moving up their primaries. And the math governing that committee may be very different from the humdrum voter math we all watched on CNN as the ballots were tallied in North Carolina.