Depending on who you listen to, Hillary Clinton has or has not a chance to win the nomination in Denver. Much of the mass media, as well as the Clinton campaign, calls it a close race, presumably for different reasons. The media likes a good fight because it sells air time; it’s also a lot of fun if you don’t give a shit about the outcome.

Clinton presumably believes that if she damages Barack Obama sufficiently to cripple his ability to run against John McCain, the party’s “super delegates” will be forced to break her way in Denver. She’s also counting on blackmailing the party into seating the illegitimate Florida and Michigan delegations by way of a nasty credentials committee fight.

Either she believes that, or she believes that once she has finished-off Obama, a one-term McCain presidency would leave her with another chance in 2012. Is she really that craven, self-absorbed, and ethically decomposing? Have you met the Clintons?

There is a tremendous load of anger and frustration not more than a half-inch below the surface right now among the professionals in the Democratic Party, and none of it is directed at Barack Obama. This is not petulance or the dislike of a good fight; nor is it the product of anti-Clinton sentiment in general. Indeed, many of these folks are long-time friends of the family. Today: the public defection of former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Reich, who has known and worked with Bill and Hillary Clinton for almost forty years.

What is driving everybody crazy is that they know – know with the certainty of pols who know how to work numbers like most people know how to work a dishwasher – that it is a mathematical impossibility for her to win. Do you think that Bill Richardson “betrayed” Hillary on a whim? Yes, he believes in Obama, as do many who have really looked at him, but Richardson’s a politician, and a politician, especially one as savvy as New Mexico’s governor, is also going to know whether something will gain or lose.

Beginning with Pennsylvania next Tuesday, there are ten more primaries or caucuses, not counting the shafted voters in Michigan and Florida. Delegates will be allotted in proportional measurement to popular votes, generally.

Between March 6th, when I first ran the numbers, and today, the mathematics of the situation, in terms of Clinton’s chances, have moved from remote to as soon as pigs fly. In March, she trailed Obama by ninety-five elected or otherwise committed delegates, and the margin was close as it was only because she’d snagged a good majority of announced “super delegates.”

Today, Clinton trails Obama by roughly 150 votes. These came from the following sources:

* a final tally in Texas where, although the media forgets to mention it, Obama won a majority of delegates;

* defecting Clinton “super delegates,” relatively few but significant nonetheless – there have been zero defections from Obama;

* a rush of new “super delegate” commitments, nearly all of them favoring Obama.

Given the number of remaining “super delegates” and any conceivable electoral outcome in the remaining caucuses and primaries, the only way Clinton could manage to pull it off would be if Obama were, in terms used more than once by Lyndon Baines Johnson, who should know, caught with a dead woman or a live boy.

Clinton has tried to create the idea in the public mind – and in this she has been abetted by a media which happily sold the Iraqi invasion – that “insiders” want to force her out of the race. Well, they probably do by now, even though when it comes to insiders Hillary Clinton is a member of the board. They didn’t care whether she stayed in, for a while, but now that she is trying to kneecap Obama they are pissed-off.

This is a puzzling concept to some, but it’s quite explicable. The pols all know that if Obama goes under to McCain a lot of them will lose their power, if not their own seats in Congress. That is not an amusing notion. Maybe not all of them are enthralled with Obama, but that’s secondary. When you threaten their livelihood, it gets personal.

As to the numbers, specifically, a Pennsylvania landslide for Clinton, even one so big that the news anchors reach orgasm in reporting it, she’ll gain, at best, fifteen delegate votes. That’s it. Hell, she’s lost that many in the past two weeks.

After Pennsylvania, there’s Indiana and North Carolina. Carolina will be an Obama landslide. He may also take Indiana. Doesn’t even matter. Pols can do the numbers; that is why – even if Clinton takes Pennsylvania by 12%, and she probably won’t unless Diebold’s counting the votes again – we will see even more previously uncommitted delegates moving to Obama.

There is a sense of urgency now in forcing Clinton to quit. She and her husband are handing soundbites to McCain every day. From the ludicrous “Commander-in-Chief Test” to the sleazier references to Louis Farrakhan, Hillary is Karl Rove’s wet dream. Everybody knows it.

Look, I also feel some measure of sadness for Clinton. For starters, just being married to Bill is a lot of go through. She thought she was going to get the nomination. She never saw Obama coming. I don’t think we know who she is. For all the typically wrong-headed media babble about how Obama hasn’t “been vetted” yet, a turn of phrase I find nauseating, it is Clinton nobody knows. Hell, she doesn’t know.

The tragedy of Hillary is that instead of being who she is and doing what she believed in, she “positioned” herself. Her vote for the war, her vote against banning land mines, her obsession with appearing tough enough... Maybe she began with what she thought – erroneously, I believe – was a need to overcome her gender. She worried about showing how tough she could be.

We’ll never know if the bellicose side of Clinton, the incendiary comments about Iran, for example, and the threat of attacking anyone, regardless of existing treaties, who hit one of our close allies, e.g. Israel, if this was real. In any case, she adopted it.

That’s not leadership. Leaders lead, period. They don’t “position” themselves. They don’t wait for public opinion to make it safe to criticize an atrocious, bloody, horrible war. Leaders stand up. Hillary yells; it’s not the same thing.

Maybe this is a short obit for her; it’s as generous as I can feel right now. We’ve got a chance, some kind of chance, to become a better country. I didn’t expect to see another one in my lifetime and Obama surprised me, too, just as he surprised Clinton. She needs to do something redeeming now, if she’s still capable of it, and help him defeat McCain in November. That other thing, the Denver meeting in August, that one’s over. Hillary can do the numbers, too.