Friday 23 May 2008
by: Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Commentators continue to try to discern Hillary Clinton's endgame. (Photo by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images North America)
Commentators trying to discern Hillary Clinton's endgame strategy have posited any number of wheels-within-wheels scenarios worthy of a spy novel. The simple truth has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with instinct: Keep moving forward until you drop.
It's not that she's making a calculated play for the vice presidency or trying to set herself up for another campaign in 2012 or 2016. To those who know her, it's that she really wants to be president, and that she has come tantalizingly close, and that she's going to keep moving toward that goal even if there's no obvious way to reach it. At this point, her campaign is about getting to tomorrow, and then getting to the next day, and then getting to the day after that.
Long ago, the Clinton campaign took to heart the Talking Heads' advice to "stop making sense." Back in January, the campaign's position was that amassing delegates was the only true measure of who was winning the nomination. But when Barack Obama surged ahead in the tally of pledged delegates, winning 11 primaries and caucuses in a row, the Clinton brain trust started making a case for "the popular vote" as the most reliable indicator of the party's wishes.
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