Originally Posted by Chantytown

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

It quickly made the rounds. Clinton-superdelegate Emmanuel Cleaver sought the safe refuge of Canada to reveal what even John McCain would grudgingly spill in a moment of honesty and weakness, which, in Clintonian politics, happen to be synonymous: "If I had to make a prediction right now, I'd say Barack Obama is going to be the next president. I will be stunned if he's not the next president of the United States."

Yeah? To Cheneyize my reaction: So? Who wouldn't be? Why all the shock and awe?

I'm sure if Mark Penn has bet on margin the $2.5 million that Hillary owes him, it's all down on Obama. Penn may be a poor strategist and knows not his micro from macro, but he's not crazy and, as far as I know, he can add.

What did surprise, however, was Rep. Cleaver's deeper level of on-air honesty, which received less media play than his predictive ruminations. And it was this: "If I do the party line, I'm supposed to say -- and maybe I'll say just so if anybody hears it they can say, well, 'Cleaver did the party line before he told the truth' -- we believe that a contest going all the way to the convention is good for America."

Then, just so there was no misunderstanding, he added in direct contravention of his candidate that going ... all ... the ... way to the convention would, in his opinion, be the "tragedy of tragedies."

Cleaver did not delineate the preceding tragedies on which the final one would sit atop, but permit me to take a Bushian whack at looking into his eyes and reading his mind and soul. Since I originally hailed from Cleaver's district, I feel, like George and Hillary, entitled.

It is nearly beyond debate that the most stupendously blind miscalculation made by the Clinton campaign was to bank so persistently on the issue of her experience. As I wrote a few days ago, in this election cycle "the last thing most voters wanted was more Washington experience," especially after the arrival of another candidate who promised a refreshingly radical break from the grueling business as usual.

Such was the Clinton camp's original political sin, which no amount of repentance and redirection has managed to wash away. I trust Cleaver would agree. But I also think he would agree that what followed was nearly as sinful and, from his own camp's retrospective view, tragically self-harmful. And it comes down and back to the matter that we opened with here -- the simple matter of plainspoken honesty.

Whether genetically embedded or strategically contrived, the Clinton campaign's proclivity to never concede what everyone else already knows has been a political killer by a thousand cuts. First comes a controversy, then the official response, then a convincing rebuttal, then a repetition of the official response and then even more convincing rebuttals, and so on and so on. It's been drip, drip, drip from the beginning; and the dripping has now utterly drained the campaign's credibility.

Right out of the gate, you may recall, was what should have been the game-ending controversy over her Iraq war vote, the truest product of all that experience. Would she confess she was wrong? Admit the mistake? Quit mumbling about diplomatic missions and concede that the resolution was -- since it was, after all, titled this way -- about military force? Of course not. Stick to one's guns and insult everyone's intelligence. That, as Cleaver has put it, was "the party line." Still is.

Then, when she started losing primaries and caucuses -- like the first one -- came tortured explanations as to how to determine a winner. After minor arguments made on behalf of the singular importance of pledged delegates, or the popular vote, or big states, or electoral counts, the grandest of all official responses has been, simply, that the Clinton campaign is who and what decides what matters. It has left voters more than a little befuddled, if not exhausted.

Mixed into this forever-churning fold has also been the explanatory marvel of merely "misspeaking" about what would have been the unmistakably memorable experience of facing sniper fire; and, for more cheap laughs, the campaign's sturdy disavowals of having stiffed a long line of vendors. Money problems? What money problems?

And throughout, of course, we have suffered all those superior lectures and official responses about what's best for the Democratic Party, which includes keeping it tragically divided through August.

That, once again, is what Emmanuel Cleaver has rather regretfully characterized as the Clintonian "party line" -- before, in his own words, he "told the truth."

Thank you, Emmanuel, even if everyone already knew it.