End Game

By superdelegates she hopes to live, but by superdelegates she may die.

News from the Texas Democratic Convention that activists are at each other's throats should put to rest the contention of supporters that Sen. Hillary Clinton's refusal to accept defeat is "good for the party."

The "Los Angeles Times," article depicts proceedings characterized by "bedlam," in which Clinton supporter Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee was booed by hundreds of Obama supporters, which if we're not mistaken, are normally her supporters.

That's what we mean by driving the party over the cliff and (everybody with it).

Those who think Jackson-Lee's district won't remember the slight at some later electoral date are drinking Kool-Aid served by the senator herself.

Indeed Sen. Clinton has taken her newly grafted "nightshift" persona to extreme limits, pouring that Kool-Aid into as many mouths she can pry open.

Comes news in Sunday's "Washington Post," that Clinton not only refuses to bow out, but plans a "fight all the way to the convention."

That's code for. "I care most about myself."

Ms. Clinton is quoted as saying the party will resolve the Michigan-Florida mess at the convention, because, "that's what credentials committees are for."

Which is to say she's all for party mechanics when it serves her purposes, but has no use for the same rules which discredited the two states in the first place, or when she's knocking the caucuses by which Democrats in most states express their preferences.

Clinton continues to serve her unfortunate supporters the Michigan-Florida cocktail with a guile that crossed the line into dishonesty the first time she brought it up.

No Clinton supporter, drunk on the possibilities of the Michigan-Florida concoction, remembers that their candidate signed a pledge to skip those primaries nor that her vaunted "victories" occurred following zero days of campaigning.

Zero.

Maybe signing the pledge was a "misstatement."

Confronted with a rising crescendo of "enuf!" Clinton clings to a strategy of attrition and the hope Obama will trip himself up.

Two weeks ago FOX News did the job for Obama, putting a friend's words in his mouth, but it didn't stick.

At the tables marked "reserved," the nightshifter is serving up a "flawed candidate" theory - which contravenes evidence gathered in states disparate as Wyoming and Iowa - that white guys won't jump for Obama if offered the Gentleman John McCain option in November.

But as "New York Times," columnist Frank Rich noted in his Sunday column, Obama's fate may not, after all, be buried by "a stereotypical white blue-collar male voter in the apotheosized rust belt town of Deer Hunter, Pa."

Writes Rich, "Well, Mr. Obama isn't going to win every white vote. But two big national polls late last week, both conducted since he addressed the Wright controversy, found scant change in Mr. Obama's support. In The Wall Street Journal/NBC News Survey, his white support was slightly up. As pollster Peter Hart put it, his result was a 'myth buster'."

Ms. Clinton's friend Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, and other establishment endorsers, may deliver her the Keystone State, but it won't do much to close the delegate gap she surrendered through a February strategy blunder.

Superdelegates get more than Clinton Kool-Aid. They drink at the open bar and the prospect of the party coming undone presents the kind of circumstances wherein they are supposed to bring their weight to bear.

Ms. Clinton's last hope may have been their turning her way, but the hunch here is that, very soon, party pillars will go for the other guy to avoid drowning in the blood she's selfishly drawing.