No Endgame.(The Talk of the Town)(Hillary Clinton)

Presidential-primary races tend to proceed along self-reflexive lines. The candidate who is ahead--or who is perceived to be--receives more press coverage. He collects more contributions and endorsements, and these generate still more media attention, which brings in more money, more votes, and so on. Meanwhile, his opponents find that they cannot pay their staffs, or afford to hire a bus, or attract more than a clutch of peevish reporters to their news conferences. Hoping to make it onto the short list for Vice-President, the laggards throw their support to the front-runner, and the contest comes to an abrupt, if not necessarily satisfying, close.

Hillary Clinton is perhaps the first candidate in primary history to run this process in reverse. The longer the race has gone on, the lower the odds have become that she will finish the season leading either in the popular vote or in elected delegates. (After her victory in Pennsylvania last month, Slate calculated that she would still need eighty per cent "of every remaining vote" to catch up with Barack Obama in pledged delegates, and this week's contests in Indiana and North Carolina seem unlikely to alter that math substantially.) Clinton's once commanding lead among superdelegates has shrunk by three-quarters. At various points, her campaign has been on the verge of going broke. Nevertheless, rather than growing weaker, she seems to have become more formidable. How is this possible? And, perhaps more to the point, how can it possibly end?

Last week, the political news was dominated by yet another Obama-related embarrassment. The Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.,'s performance at the National Press Club, with its praise for Louis Farrakhan--"one of the most important voices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries"--and its insistence that the United States government is capable of spreading AIDS as a form of genocide, was either foolhardy or treacherous. "Jeremiah Wright has managed to do the impossible this political season," the Web site RealClearPolitics observed, "unite pundits from the left and the right in agreement about how badly he's hurting Barack Obama's quest for the White House." The incident raised, or, if you prefer, re-raised, questions about Obama's judgment. It refocussed the campaign on race. And it fed concerns that the Senator lacks the instincts to win a 24/7, spare-no-attack election.

"Obama seems more and more like someone buffeted by events, rather than in charge of them" is how the Times' Bob Herbert put it. The Senator's response to Wright's statements--they "offend me," he told reporters the following day. "They rightly offend all Americans, and they should be denounced. And that's what I am doing very clearly and unequivocally"--was so overdetermined that it was hard to say whether it represented actually taking charge or was another example of being buffeted.

In the course of the campaign, Clinton has tried out at least a dozen lines of attack against Obama, from ridiculing his message of hope--"The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing"--to questioning his ...