The Hour is Late for Hillary Clinton

We've only had the Iowa caucuses, and already the buzz is that Hillary Clinton's through.

Matt Drudge provides online tabloid speculation that H.R.C. is ready to withdraw from the race.

I don't believe it for a second, as bad as things are.

Bob Shrum's got a more compelling argument over at the New York Daily News. He suggests Hillary won't be making an acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Will Barack Obama give her a prime time speaking slot?

If (although I strongly suspect the right word is "when") Hillary Clinton loses tomorrow's New Hampshire primary, there will be a few proto-obituaries for her campaign and many more stories about how it will be "shaken up" or "relaunched." Scapegoats will be found and exiled: Mark Penn, the pollster and strategist, foremost among them. After all, the candidate can't very well dispense with the überstrategist who also happens to be her husband and who was fully complicit in designing and driving her message.

The flaw wasn't just the attempt to go back to the future, to the 1990s, but that the Clintons picked the wrong year in that decade. Instead of 1992, when Bill was the personification of change, their model was 1996. So Hillary ran as a pseudo-incumbent, with a selection of bite-size proposals and an abundance of caution and transparent calculation. Why would any campaign ever explicitly announce a tour to make the candidate "likable"? Or, as happened when the beleaguered Clinton machine sputtered into New Hampshire, that they now had a plan for her to be spontaneous and actually answer audience questions?

The Clinton industry, encrusted with the beneficiaries and acolytes of the first and probably only Clinton presidency, has turned Hillary into a product whose sell-by date has passed. In a year of change, she has been positioned as the establishment candidate. The relentless appeal to "experience" reinforces that - and too often elides into a dubious attempt to take credit for some of Bill's accomplishments.

More fundamentally, Hillary seems to be making an argument about herself, not the future or the voters. No wonder she is losing to a young senator who comes across as the leader of a revolution in our politics.

There could still be a Clinton miracle, but by tomorrow night she is more likely to be the KOd Kid than the Comeback Kid.

I like the analysis, but note Shrum's got a notoriously lousy record. He's failed miserably as a top campaign strategist for numerous unsuccessful presidential races. Yep, he's 0-7 in presidential elections, with the last being John Kerry's disastrous presidential run in 2004.

He could be right in this case, but don't bet on it.

Hillary probably will lose tomorrow. But there's still "Giga-Tuesday" on February 5, when 22 states will hold their primary contests. Even with an Obama sweep of Iowa and New Hampshire, there's still a race to be won, around the country, where voters are very different from the narrow constituencies of Des Moines or Concord.

Of course, talk of a Hillary slide is reasonable (and Clinton's tearful television interviews aren't helping her case for leadership), but look to other voices besides Shrum's for more credible analysis (and Matt Drudge is just chumming the blogging waters).