I dropped in a line the other day about having come to the disappointing conclusion that our nose-holding alternatives in November would be John McCain and Hillary Clinton.
Say what?
How is Clinton supposed to catch Barack Obama in earned delegates with time running out and no winner-take-all events available?
How is she supposed to persuade super-delegates to reject the leader in earned delegates and risk alienating blacks?
Here's how:
She wins or nearly wins North Carolina on Tuesday. She's been steadily closing the gap there, where, only days ago, Obama was conceded a rout on account of the black vote.
She wins Indiana by several points, six or eight.
She then will have taken four of the last six primaries, and all of the significant ones Ohio, Texas (in primary votes, anyway), Pennsylvania and Indiana.
Polls will continue to show Obama damaged by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and other concerns about his mainstream compatibility. Tellingly, Republicans will continue airing attack ads on local Democrats in Southern states seeking to tie those local Democrats not to Clinton, but Obama.
Clinton will continue to trail in the popular vote, but by a steadily eroding margin rendered dubious if you include, even if only in your abstract thinking, Florida and Michigan. Those are two states difficult not to think about.
Savvy super-delegates will, not without pain, come to the conclusion that, here at the end, she simply is the better alternative possessed of greater strength.
They will talk among themselves about how to justify an en masse endorsement of her, and will settle on her performance lately and in the big, important states. They will settle, too, on heaping great praise on Obama as a transformational and uncommonly talented figure, but one who, unfairly, even tragically, was deeply damaged by his association with the now widely despised pastor.
Not even one as gifted and noble as Obama, they will say, can carry to November the weight of an association with a man who has damned the country Obama proposes to lead.
They will have had enough of total cultural alienation in the South. At least Clinton might take Arkansas. Name a Democrat who's become president without something from the South? There isn't one.
They will calculate that if there are any two white people in the country who could repair the certain breach with African-Americans, it's the Clintons.
They will trust that Obama will, after a few days of huffiness, do the conciliatory thing in the greater interest of the party, the country and himself.
They will ask him to be her running mate, but, understandably, he will be unable to stoop to that indignity. No problem. She'll pick Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, and fashion key electoral leverage.
And they will rely on the emergence of an entirely new dynamic for the fall, one in which the Democratic base and swing voters will coalesce in aversion to four more years of anything remotely resembling what we have now in regard to the economy and international relations.
You ask: Is that really plausible? It's not certain. It has risks. But it's doable, especially the part about reconciliation amid an entirely new dynamic in the fall.
Clinton strikes me as one living by the Jimmy Johnson Rule of Success.
He's a former football coach. When he was leading the Dallas Cowboys to Super Bowl victories, he once said that he entertained no thought about anything past the next game on Sunday. For him, he said, the world ended Sunday.
That's intense focus, the mark of successful people. You obsess wholly on the task at hand.
Irreparable breaches in the fall campaign? What are you talking about? Don't you know that world ends Tuesday?
John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
