What might have been
The WSJ reflects on the closeness of Senator Clinton’s loss:
Though she lost the delegate battle on the February 5 Super Tuesday primary, she won big in California and New Jersey. A month later she won the crucial battleground state of Ohio by 10 and Texas by 4. She took Pennsylvania by 10. West Virginia, historic ground for Democrats, was a Hillary rout.
Her support, especially in such blue-collar redoubts as Youngstown and southern Ohio, was as enthusiastic as any we have witnessed in modern politics. Lower-middle-class women especially saw her as a pathbreaker, refuting the notion that her symbolic candidacy was limited to upscale professional women. She earned 18 million votes. Joe Biden won something like 9,000.
Perhaps Senator Obama will be the next President, or perhaps he will be in 2012. But is it not at all possible that he may come to be seen, in retrospect, as a flash in the pan — a brief moment of hype and grandiosity that, as time passed, seemed less and less significant until, years later, no one could quite remember just what the fuss was all about?