Feeling her pain

There’s plenty of good reason to encourage a thoroughbred racehorse, winner or not, to “gallop out” after passing the finish wire. It helps the horse cool down and is said to aid in preventing post-race soreness. Some handicappers watch gallop-outs carefully, believing they’ll find clues as to health, strength, attitude and future performance of a given horse and jockey combination.

Some horses, it seems, "gallop out" past the wire for several furlongs on their own accord while others, sensing that the race is over, will slow themselves down and happily head for the paddock.

That's how we should think about the Democratic primary race these days.

Allowing a candidate who has run so hard for such a long race to have a decent amount of time to wind down with dignity would hurt no one and would likely help the Party.

Moreover, it is clearly silly, and disrespectful, for opinion purveyors in the media to continue to wonder aloud why Hillary Clinton is still running. They claim bewilderment that she has not done the math, seen the writing on the wall, and torn her campaign into little pieces. After all, in their opinion, Obama clearly can’t be beaten and there are only a handful of primaries left.

Even so, there are only a handful of primaries left, so why not indulge the voters in those states by allowing them to be part of the process? After all, Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy is obviously going to be in play this time around, and with this primary season drawing folks in every state out to vote, many for the first time, this fall’s election promises to be transformative.

Of course, it would be well if during this period there is an effort to cool down without destroying. In the home stretch of the campaign, it would hurt neither herself nor the Party should Sen. Clinton choose to turn her withering remarks to the Republican in the race.

Which brings me to today’s point: Though I have been highly critical of her for a good long while, I have considerable empathy for Mrs. Clinton; I do not have sympathy for her.

Like most of us, I have lost a battle or two in my life, some more important than others, and I can tell you that losing can be a little tough, or it can be really hard; it can be frustrating, and even infuriating; it can be excruciatingly painful.

Mrs. Clinton’s has not been a race that can be easy to concede. On the one hand I blame her advisers, who clearly encouraged her to believe in her inevitability from the very beginning, ignoring one of the simplest rules of politics, that nothing is certain and anything can happen.

On the other hand, she chose those advisers and chose to believe them — even, to the detriment of her campaign, exuding a sense of entitlement well beyond the point where she should have known better.

Her path, overall, is littered with mistakes, some of which have proved more damaging than others, but most of which might have been avoided had she simply opted from the beginning to run a plain-spoken and principled campaign — after all, see how Sen. McCain’s “straight-talk” reputation seems to have protected him from all manner of unpopular and even bizarre positions.

But it’s too late for Hillary Clinton.

Like the protagonist in a Shakespearean tragedy, she has been brought down by her own flaws.

As a flawed person, I can certainly empathize, but I don’t feel sorry for her at all.