Just Above Sunset

Well, that song was the smash hit of 1962 – but Neil Sedaka, the fellow of Turkish-Jewish descent from Brooklyn, who wrote and performed it, was onto something, and it wasn’t a bad tune. In 1947, Sedaka auditioned successfully for a piano scholarship to the Juilliard School’s Preparatory Division for Children, so he knew a thing or two. Good tune and a lyric that, even if monumentally silly, caught the real essentials of the matter and laid them all out there – a winner. Yes, breaking up is hard to do.  

And cover versions of the song followed over the years, often as slow-tempo, wistful and longing takes on the original. Sedaka himself re-recorded it as a ballad in 1975 and that version peaked at number eight in February of the following year, and it went to number one on the Adult Contemporary chart. Who knew?

In 1965 Sedaka was set to compete at the Tchaikovsky piano competition in Moscow, but his participation in the competition, which Van Cliburn had won in 1958, was abruptly cancelled by the Soviets – the guy did bubble-gum pop-rock after all. They would have none of him. Some things were not meant to be. They don’t work out. He understood that.

Sure, you don’t want to let go of your dream, what you are sure will make you happy, what you know is your destiny. But others have a say in the matter – you are told “it’s not you, really, it’s me” – and the love of your life walks away. Of course, over the years, you’ve used that same line yourself, so you know the routine. You know it really is you – the other party just didn’t want to say that, having come to know you quite well, they have decided that you’re quite repulsive, actually. You’ve done that yourself – you’ve taken the easy way out, lying through your teeth, and let the other party down easy. Of course it’s a joke. You’re letting yourself down easy. You just don’t want to tell that once lovely woman that, lately, she’s come to remind you of an East German shot-putter you once watched in the Olympics way back when. John Barrymore put it nicely – “Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.”

So how do you say it really is over? The supporters of Hillary Clinton, after the results of the primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, are facing that problem. They seem to have a haddock on their hands.

The day after the two primaries – he won North Carolina by a landslide and her impressive lead in Indiana got smaller and smaller and she finally won, barely, by two percentage points – things looked bad:

Barack Obama’s march toward the Democratic presidential nomination picked up support from four more superdelegates Wednesday, pushing him ever closer to victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton - even as their primary marathon staggered on.

She had cancelled her round of appearances on the morning news shows – she probably wasn’t up to being chipper and feisty. And the headlines on the AP wire were dismal.

Clinton lends her struggling campaign $6.4 million – funding had been drying up all along, and all in all she’d chucked in over eleven million dollars of her own, which no one had realized, because after the first five million, her campaign seems to have thought it best not to mention the matter.

And there was the matter of momentum, as in Obama ascendant after trading primary wins with Clinton – everyone seemed to know what was really happening.

And he was moving on, as in Obama weighs next moves, maps out general election strategy – as if she really didn’t matter all that much now, and it was time for him to take on the John McCain and the Republican noise machine. She seems to have become instantly irrelevant.

And there was the math of it all, as in Obama wins most delegates in Tuesday’s primaries – she’s not going to catch up.

And there was the final blow – McGovern, former Clinton backer, endorses Obama – but the elderly George McGovern just didn’t endorse Obama, he said his life-long friend should drop out, now, for the good of the party. But he also said he still likes her; in fact, he admires her tremendously. That was pretty much like saying that it’s not you, really – it’s me, as I need to move on.

Yes, breaking up is hard to do, and as Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton was born on October 26, 1947, she must know that Neil Sedaka tune – 1962 was ninth grade, and we all listen to that sort of thing.

But like any dreamy ninth-grade girl who just doesn’t believe the hunky senior football star isn’t particularly interested in her, she preferred denial:

Her money drained and her options dwindling, a resolute Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to press on with her presidential bid even as she and top advisers were hard-pressed to describe a realistic path for her to wrest the nomination from Barack Obama.

And there was the morning call-in that all the campaigns do now, daily, to spin events. See this comment at Daily Kos:

For those hoping that Hillary would graciously accept the reality that she isn’t going to win the nomination… don’t. During a conference call this morning, the Clinton campaign said that they will continue to fight for the nomination because, well, because. The (long) hour boiled down to, she has the best chance to beat McCain, she wins all the really important states, and darn it, white people really like her.

But what is there to like. Philip Klein, at the American Spectator, seems to see the haddock:

It has become popular in conservative circles these days to suggest that “you just gotta admire her tenacity,” a sentiment that is advanced at her campaign rallies…

But what is there to admire about this so-called “tenacity”? Clinton began this campaign with a financial edge, the support of a popular former Democratic president, a built-in political apparatus, a consistent lead of more than 20 points in national polls, and more than a hundred superdelegates.

If a candidate starts off with all of those advantages and is too stubborn to drop out of the race, it’s no surprise that she is still hanging on.

There is absolutely nothing admirable about a politician so narcissistic and hungry for power that she is willing to say or do whatever suits her political interests at any given moment. If the Republican Party has declined to the point where conservatives are so worried about defeating a freshman Senator that they are rooting for Clinton to do their dirty work for them, it is simply pathetic.

And some other things, it seems, were actually meant to be, as one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers notes here:

I had a moment last night when I realized something significant about the historic timing of the Democratic convention. The Democratic nominee (Obama) will give his acceptance speech on August 28, 2008 … forty-five years to the day of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The dream does, in fact, live on.

That’s spooky. And others were doing odd reassessments, on the whole Jeremiah Wright business, like Newsweek’s Sally Quinn with this:

“You don’t choose your family but you choose what church you want to attend,” she said. But you do choose your husband.

She chose Bill Clinton. And she has not gotten up and moved.

Instead, she has enabled him over the last 32 years of their marriage, not only standing by him, denying what she knew about his womanizing and trying to delegitimize those who told the truth about it…

About one girlfriend, Connie Hamzy, she said, “We have to destroy her story.”

About Gennifer Flowers she denied the story even after having a tape played on television about it. It was “attack the motives and the details,” said former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers to Sally Bedell Smith, author of “For Love of Politics” (ever wonder why so many former Clintonites are not supporting her or are actively supporting Obama? And what about Senate colleagues?). He was accused of sexually harassing Kathleen Willey. He was accused of rape by Juanita Broadrick, exposed himself to Paula Jones and finally had a sexual relationship with a 21-year-old White House intern, a few years older than his own daughter…

Hillary did not get up and move.

Hey – wake up, turn your head, and you see a haddock.

And then there was Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, suddenly underwhelmed by her vow to “totally obliterate” another county, specifically Iran:

Well, I am certainly doing my best not to take sides in this presidential thing. But I think that flexing our muscles, threatening people, threatening countries, is not the American way. We have - as President Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt said, to “speak softly, carry a big stick.” Words to that effect. And that’s what I think we should do. Speak softly, make sure that people know that we can react if we have to, but let’s not go around threatening people.

At one point it may have been charming and exhilarating to hear her say she would have no problem with killing seventy million people – every man, woman and child. Then you think about it. You see that East German shot-putter.

Andrew Sullivan puts it another way. Forceful and dynamic fearless people in the end turn out to be repulsive:

You keep waiting, expecting, and predicting that Hillary Clinton is going to give up, throw in the towel, make a concession speech and go back to the Senate. Every time things get worse you make that prediction, and she keeps going. And that is what Bill Clinton really brought to American politics: the total lack of shame, decency, and a sense of the appropriate.

His evidence:

How many times was Bill Clinton pinned to the wall over countless misdeeds, and each time - when any normal human being would turn red, mumble an apology, and slink away - he held his chin up high and went forward. Being grilled on 60 Minutes over his countless affairs? Being sued for sexual harassment? Being caught in a lie in front of the whole world? Nope, no big deal, business as usual, let’s move forward.

So we are where we are:

Honestly, can you think of ANYTHING that would have caused Bill Clinton to just hang his head in shame and to retire from public life? And if you thought he was bad, there is poll result, delegate count, fundraising statistics, whatever that would cause Hillary Clinton to quit. When this is all over, when Obama or McCain or whomever is elected president, Hillary Clinton will still be standing in front of an almost empty room with a sagging Clinton 2008 banner behind her, still talking in a hoarse but measured voice about legal options and taking her case all the way to the Supreme Court.

No – she’s not that crazy – close sometimes, but not that crazy.

But to get back to Neil Sedaka territory, there’s Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, saying Hillary Clinton’s problem is with that elusive butterfly, Barack Obama. And Dowd ends with this:

As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly, it’s as though she’s crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence.

Oh crap – now those of us who are Hillary Clinton’s age also have to deal with this crappy tune from the sixties. No fair – and how did this all turn into bubble-gum pop songs from the sixties?

By the way, Kevin Drum from his perch at the Washington Monthly is not impressed with the Times:

This would be embarrassing coming from a twelve-year-old. Shouldn’t Dowd have an obscure blog, not a biweekly column in the greatest newspaper in the world?

Drum does not seem moved by Dowd’s evocation the ineffable sadness of the loss of girlish innocence, even if it is a staple of bubble-gum pop songs.

But like any dreamy ninth-grade girl who just doesn’t believe the hunky senior football star isn’t particularly interested in her, she must realize the truth. Daddy will explain the heard truth to her, in this case, the daddy played by Tim Russert. The New York Times explains:

Very early this morning, after many voters had already gone to sleep, the conventional wisdom of the elite political pundit class that resides on television shifted hard, and possibly irretrievably, against Senator Hillary Clinton’s continued viability as a presidential candidate.

The moment came shortly after midnight Eastern Time, captured in a devastatingly declarative statement from Tim Russert of NBC News: “We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it,” he said on MSNBC. “Those closest to her will give her a hard-headed analysis, and if they lay it all out, they’ll say: ‘What is the rationale? What do we say to the undeclared super delegates tomorrow? Why do we tell them you’re staying in the race?’ And tonight, there’s no good answer for that.”

It was not exactly Walter Cronkite declaring that the Vietnam War would end in stalemate. But the impact was apparent almost immediately, starting with The Drudge Report, the online news billboard that is the home page to many political reporters in Washington and news producers in New York. It had as its lead story a link to a YouTube clip of Mr. Russert’s comments, accompanied by a photograph of a beaming Mr. Obama with his wife, Michelle, and the headline, “The Nominee.”

Out here in Santa Monica, Digby at Hullabaloo was not impressed:

It reminds me of the halcyon days for Democrats in November and December 2000, when Russert used his little marking board to show us “the math” and declare that Gore needed to bow out for the good of the country. Good times. (And when did that GOP washing machine Drudge become an “online news billboard?”)

Look, I have the same analysis of the outcome of the elections in Indiana and North Carolina that most people have this morning. Clinton’s best argument - which was essentially that the voters were taking a second look at Obama and showing some buyer’s remorse - didn’t pan out last night. And there’s nothing wrong with political junkies sitting around the virtual pot-bellied stove and saying the race is “over” or exhorting her to drop out. We’re citizens and, in some cases, political players. There is, however, something unbelievably distasteful about a handful of powerful, millionaire, celebrity pundits “declaring” such a thing and having the paper of record breathlessly report it as if it was decisive and meaningful.

Who the fuck anointed Tim Russert as the final arbiter of anything? His job is to analyze the political landscape, not declare the decision as if he were some kind of Roman Emperor giving a thumbs up or thumbs down. It’s bad enough that these gasbags put those thumbs on the scale as hard as they do, but actually taking the initiative to say when the race is over is even worse. …

Here’s the reality Digby sees:

It may be that last night really was the tie-breaker that showed that Obama’s campaign could withstand some harsh press and rebound from setbacks. It’s not a bad thing for Democratic voters to test that out and give him some practice. If he’s the nominee and then the president, he’s going to have to get used to it. But if it is the end, as I think many of us suspect, it’s for Senator Clinton to be the one to declare it, not Tim Russert or any other fatuous overpaid Village gasbag who is no more insightful or informed than any of you.

Maybe so – maybe we have all those damned pop songs in our heads. Still it seems that now Clinton’s only option is what David Corn of Mother Jones here calls a “nullification strategy.” That comes down to this – “Endorse me, superdelegates, because … because … because I say so, damn it!”

It seems very ninth-grade, doesn’t it? That was when we all listened to Neil Sedaka – and oddly enough, he was right.