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Apologies for the lack of "reporting" for this post. But hey--this is a blog post, so it's cool. Right?

For a long time leading up to the Iowa caucus, I read and heard talk that Hillary Clinton was conducting a campaign based on the premise that her nomination--and perhaps even a win in the general election--were inevitable. That argument seemed a bit strong to me; though I'm not at all a Hillary-hater, there are plenty of people who don't like her with a vehemence that can most politely be described as "irrational." I thought, then, that surely the Clinton campaign was aware of her high negatives and therefore wouldn't presume anything, much less inevitability. Complacency for Hillary, of all the people campaigning, would be a fundamental mistake.

At first, things I saw from their campaign argued against that: the web announcement with its soft lighting and talk about having a "conversation;" the goofy-but-friendly theme-song contest (though their selection of a Celine Dion song should have been a warning--and I'm not entirely joking here). I also figured that once campaigning began in earnest, Hillary would engage in something along the lines of the listening tour she did during her campaign for the Senate in New York--something which, I've heard people, say, went a long way toward winning over skeptical up-staters to her side. But unless I missed that part, she didn't do that in Iowa, apart from town-hall meetings. What her campaign did do, though, was heap scorn on Obama's rather mild critiques of her stance on certain issues by calling his campaign "flagging" and "flailing." The implicit message was clear: Hillary's already won this thing; can we get on with the voting already and just make it official?

Then came the voting, and we know what happened. From thence, I read, went soothing, reassuring calls from the Clinton campaign to supporters and donors that the nomination would be sewn up with the returns from Super Tuesday, along with criticism of the caucus format as disenfranchising (ironic, given events to come in Nevada). Either confidence or chutzpah, take your pick, but still: the a priori assumption behind calls like that was Clinton's inevitability. And, I have to confess, the New Hampshire results--which, we know, Clinton fully anticipated losing--caused me to think they might be right, that voters would see that primary as a sort of righting of the political cosmos and that would be that.

But then came Nevada and South Carolina. No matter one's take on what drove the Clintons and their supporters to say the things they said and, in Nevada, to challenge previously-agreed-upon caucus rules, one thing that was made abundantly clear even to those favorably predisposed toward Hillary was that the inevitability narrative was not playing out as scripted--and not just in South Carolina, either. For them to campaign there as hard as they did in SC and then be so dismissive of the results--to move from banking on Bill Clinton's strong appeal among African-Americans to saying, in effect, that they concede the black vote to Obama because we don't need them to win this thing and besides, what good did they do Jesse Jackson, anyway?--the dark side of inevitability, arrogance, revealed itself.

Actually, one could see signs of that arrogance in Iowa: I read a post-mortem of that caucus that reported local Hillary campaign folks feeling frustrated and angry at the national office's disregard for advice they offered about strategy, rallies, etc.

So here we are, post-Super Tuesday and post-Obama's very very impressive 3-state-and-1-possession sweep last night. Hillary's campaign may or may not be broke, leading me to think that maybe they really DID think they'd wrap up the nomination on Super Tuesday. The old mantra of Inevitability is out; they tell us now that Obama is the Establishment Candidate--not QUITE the same as saying he's now the inevitability candidate, but not far off. It's hard not to read such a shift as being a tacit admission of their strategy's essential failure.

Of the two choices available to me--derision or sadness--I'll opt for sadness. Really. It gains no one anything to gloat over this. It's probably true that in just about any other election one could have envisioned, Hillary's campaign strategy would have worked. And, it did work--it winnowed the field of highly-qualified candidates pretty quickly. But this election has in it a candidate whose like we've not seen in at least a generation if not longer, and it's Clinton's misfortune that he happens to be a Democrat, too. More fundamental than that, though, is that Obama has NOT run a campaign of presumption. His favorite pronoun in his stump speeches is "we"--and he's not speaking of himself and his organization when he says "we," either. Hope has proven itself to be more than a little resistant to inevitability.

Clinton may yet win the nomination via the upcoming elections or at the convention. Either way, though, she--and the Democrats--would be wise to remember this primary season. Her inevitability long ago ceased being the self-fulfilling prophecy her campaign had wanted.