Forty years ago, on June 4th, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot in the head in a narrow room adjacent to the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just won the California primary election and was now the probable next President of the United States.

Yesterday, I awakened from a late-afternoon nap and switched on MSNBC for the day’s latest political news and saw –– as did many millions of Americans –– Hillary Clinton speak about the possible assassination of Barack Obama.

She and her campaign staff then tried several times to ‘explain’ what she said, although as Eugene Robinson pointed out what she in fact said admits of no such possibility. In law school we learned a few handy Latin legal terms, one of which was ‘res ipsa loquitur’. The thing speaks for itself.

Across the mass media and spreading through the internet are choruses of professed shock, disbelief, anger, and self-righteous idiocy, not limited by political party or ideology but sharing one unifying characteristic: denial.

Denial: that Clinton had in mind the possibility that Barack Obama would be assassinated.

Denial: that political candidates ever entertain such thoughts, nor discuss them with close advisers.

Denial: that discussion of political assassination has a ‘proper’ place in political discourse in the United States.

There are two salient facts here. One is that Clinton has certainly considered that her candidacy, having failed electorally, remains viable only if Obama dies. One would have to cling to a naivete bordering on the comatose to believe otherwise. She is not the only candidate ever to think such dark thoughts.

The second is that the prospective assassination of a political candidate in America is based in the even darker reality of our political life and history, not because we have been robbed of two Kennedys by crazed lone gunmen but because by this time we surely know that these murders were motivated by power, and carried out by people in a position to plan and execute them.

America in 2008 presents a political context notable for its similarity to 1968. Forty years ago, with a failed war and domestic unrest giving rise to a popular movement for change, there were three serious candidates for the presidency. These were Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and Robert Kennedy. (McCarthy’s candidacy was never a legitimate prospect; if necessary, I’ll explain that some other time). The forces which had executed John Kennedy were untroubled by Nixon and Humphrey, each of whom had long since whored themselves out. But Bob Kennedy was dangerous. Not only would he reverse America’s war policies, threatening the vast financial windfall being gathered by Brown & Root (precursor to KBR, which is today Halliburton), and the arms merchants, he had confided to his closest friends that he would go after the men who had killed his brother, and those people knew it.

In 2008, we are witnessing the first populist insurgency in 40 years in the candidacy of Senator Obama. His principal opponents, McCain and Clinton, are both creatures of the country’s ruling corporations and its military/security apparatus. Obama is therefore at risk. He knows it; his people know it; the media know it; Clinton and McCain know it.

The American people know it, too. Millions are aware of what actually happened forty years ago –– not the made-for-TV, officially-sanctioned fantasy –– and understand therefore that there are forces in the country who regard an Obama presidency as personally dangerous. This is not only a matter of political and economic power, the loss of jobs or the billions of dollars in graft currently being siphoned from the treasury through fraud and war profiteering. It is a matter of prison terms.

The reason the media don’t want to talk about assassination and the reason politicians, though they all think it, are not going to say so, is that what really happened in 1963, and again in 1968, has never been admitted, nor the perpetrators exposed or prosecuted. There has existed for forty years the worst conspiracy of all, the conspiracy of silence. It is the conspiracy of silence which makes possible further horrors, and it is the conspiracy of silence which makes of us all accessories both before and after the fact.

Hillary Clinton’s great crime is that, tired and running out of rationales, she blurted a reference to what no one is supposed to mention. Her ‘great crime’ is nothing in comparison with our own.

I’ve had this theory for a long time about how people can wind-up worshipping at the feet of an evil empire while continuing to believe that they’re free. I think it happens in much the same way the nation no longer knows what a strawberry tastes like but still thinks that’s what it’s eating.

My earliest years in this happy incarnation were spent in Madison, Wisconsin, that mythical town where a lot of progressive impulses have flourished for better than a hundred years and where both Robert LaFollette and Wayne Morse were born. My immigrant grandfather owned a very large shipping operation for fresh produce, and I used to hang around the warehouses on Saturday mornings while my Dad did whatever dads do as maybe heirs-apparent at the in-laws’ operations. There were guys carrying enormous loads of bananas on their backs and the air was one part fruits and vegetables and one part cigar and cigarette smoke.

One of the many perks in this situation was the opportunity to ingest pretty much as many strawberries as I could manage, which was a lot. God, they were sweet.

But those strawberries are mostly gone now. Sure, you can locate the real thing at a farmers’ market, just as you can locate the last vestige of free and independent media if you’ve got two hundred channels, or navigate the web, and happen to catch Rachel Maddow or Gene Robinson or Keith Olbermann.

People still think they are buying strawberries at Safeway, and they think they’re getting a spectrum of political news from networks like CNN, where Wolf Blitzer and other assorted airheads give viewers an entire range of opinion, from conservative to fascist. Ann Coulter. I mean, what’s missing? A fireside chat with Adolph Hitler?

If you take a color, say ‘blue’, and change it a little bit each day, just a little, hardly noticed by a distracted, gullible citizenry, eventually ‘blue’ will be solid red. It might be called ‘democracy’ instead of ‘blue’.

Okay, you know all of this. You also know that the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Hillary Clinton have each been run by people whose profession is that of lobbyist. Well, what’s so strange about that?

Presidential campaigns have changed through history. Until the mid-nineteen hundreds they were run by party hacks, the Karl Rove types who knew how to apply a bit of muscle when and where required. JFK’s manager was his brother, Robert, and his top guys were personal friends such as Larry O’Donnell. Nixon’s races were run by public relations experts. Jimmy Carter had his own people, Hamilton Jordan, and pollster Pat Caddell.

In the 1980s, beginning with Reagan, big money began to assert itself. The people running campaigns became, transparently, the interface between money and operations. We own you, the corporations were saying, and we’re putting our own people in charge.

Now we’ve got lobbyists running campaigns whose agencies received payments –– from Lockheed-Martin, pharamaceutical and insurance companies, telecommunications giants such as AT&T –– in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Let that register for a minute...

Then consider that the way it works is that a corporation will expect to receive through these lobbyists government contracts or tax breaks worth maybe a hundred-times that much. You need not apply advanced arithmetic to the situation.

There is only one possible interpretation of this. And yet Americans, blinded by the media’s bullshit and their own laziness, will have voted in the millions for candidates who are in bed with corporate criminals such as Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and AT&T.

It’s crazy, but people keep calling these things ‘strawberries’.

“It never would’ve happened,” Bobby Kennedy famously said, “except we were all so tired that night.”

What Kennedy was referring to was the nomination of Lyndon Johnson as his brother’s running-mate in 1960.

The background was this:

The race for the nomination had been modestly contentious among JFK, Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey (with Adlai Stevenson’s loyalists aligning with LBJ to try to stop JFK). LBJ was the Senate Majority Leader and an immensely powerful, suitably corrupt man. He and the Kennedys despised each other.

The Kennedys knew the race against Nixon would be close, and the electoral maps they were working with indicated that they would have to carry Texas in order to win the general election. JFK decided that in order to insure the active support of Johnson he would offer the vice presidential nomination to him.

At that time, the vice presidency was an office accurately described by a former V.P., John Nance Garner, as a “bucket of warm spit.” It held no power and was largely ceremonial; V.P.s were kept out of the policy loops. JFK was certain that Johnson, if offered the job, would decline it. But the offer itself would demonstrate good faith and help assuage Johnson’s supporters.

RFK tried to talk him out of it, without success. Then Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House and Johnson crony, convinced LBJ to accept.

The electoral map broke the way Kennedy had predicted, and Texas gave him a narrow victory over Richard Nixon.

The deal with Johnson, the offer of the second-spot on the ticket, was a fatal error for Kennedy.

No one speaks of it but it is nonetheless on a lot of minds. Barack Obama, for reasons some might find appealing, is an obvious target. If any person or group of persons are so endangered by his election that they feel warranted in going after him –– a clear possibility –– it would do him no harm to protect himself by selecting as his running-mate a vice president whose views, idealism, and toughness approach his own.

Barack Obama is young, brilliant, and guided by a strong moral compass. He is a very real threat to some very powerful people.

To offer the job to Clinton would therefore be a serious, perhaps dangerous, mistake.

Readers of this post may recall a number of earlier pieces which some have taken to be overly antagonistic toward Hillary Clinton. Especially the one about boiling the bunny; I agree that was tasteless, even if it was accurate.

But now, as she and her closest advisers work out the details of her withdrawal from the race, I’d like to give her an obit more sympathetic than she’s likely to get when historians write about her last campaign.

It’s easy to see how she got into this fix. Originally a woman of some heart and mind, Hillary learned over the years, especially through Bill’s early experiences in Arkansas, that winning had certain requirements, certain sacrifices of conscience. You couldn’t do anything important without power, and you couldn’t get –– or keep –– power without making the sorts of deals you wish you didn’t feel called upon to make.

This is not an unusual experience in politics. The first deals seem relatively painless, selling access to people you generally agree with anyhow. But it gets tougher as you go along. That’s why a “clean” candidate for high office is an anomaly. Any candidate who has the touted “experience” to hold the office is someone who’s been gobbling at the trough for a long time. Just wait until we get to enjoy a reprise of John McCain and the Keating Five, soon playing all over the internet, if not on Meet The Press.

Hillary knew she’d have a harder road than anybody else, with the possible exception of Obama, who she seriously underestimated. The barriers against women in office have been falling over time, but America isn’t there yet.

The Clinton campaign believed from the beginning that her greatest obstacle would be her gender. She decided, therefore, that she had to establish how “tough” she was at every opportunity. And she voted for war.

Despite what she subsequently has said about that vote, she knew exactly what it meant. She knew that Bush and the militarists would use it to launch an unprovoked invasion; she knew that at least thousands would die. So did many other Democratic Senators. Probably none of them save that moron Joe Lieberman believed in the patently false “weapons of mass destruction” story.

Throughout the campaign, Clinton has consistently adhered to the ‘toughest guy in the room’ position on issues, culminating in the loony ravings about “obliterat(ing)” Iran, which under any definition you want is a threat to exterminate an entire nation, in other words, mass murder.

Much of Clinton’s anger has stemmed from her feeling that she’d done everything right, sold enough of herself, lined-up the power brokers, raised the money, sucked up to the mass media (her intimate little pow-wow with Richard Scaife, the publisher who once accused her of having a hand in the “murder” of Vince Foster, being a recent embarassment by no means singular in nature).

The nomination, she felt, was hers. It was owed to her. She’d weathered her husband’s public humiliation of her. Now it was payback time. But the plans went awry. She had not expected Barack Obama. And as Obama began winning primaries and caucuses, as she found herself out-organized everywhere, as Obama gained more and more black support –– votes Clinton herself had been counting on, and as he began raising unheard-of sums of money via the internet, she panicked.

Her campaign thus began to wound itself. Even the Jeremiah Wright tape loop, which she and her advisers had expected to be a knockout blow, wasn’t enough to stop him, let alone the cagey responses to (probably planted) questions about whether Obama might be a Muslim, the photo of Obama in Kenyan ceremonial garb, the bogus NAFTA story just before Ohio.

Because Clinton was a candidate whose persona was artificially created, she could not respond organically to what was happening. Clearly, she and her husband and a group of advisers decided to beat Obama by indicating to voters, party officials, the mass media, and the super delegates, that he could not win the general election because he is black.

In one sense, this is a perfectly reasonable line of attack. She was not going to win enough delegates in the primaries unless she could marginalize Obama, and the only real leverage she had was his race. Thus came the entire catalogue of modern racial politics. No one knew whether a black candidate could win because none ever had. If her campaign could widen existing racial division, if it could raise doubts and fear, she would still have a chance.

One of the more tragic aspects of the Clinton story is that Hillary has become so isolated and self-referential as to actually lose touch with reality. This, of course, is a disease to which politicians are prone, and it’s never a good thing, but when it reaches –– or descends to –– the level it has here, the candidate becomes unable to process what even his or her closest friends are saying.

So we have now, coming from the Clinton camp, wildly divergent and totally inconsistent scenarios and ‘battle plans’, none of which have the slightest chance of success unless something terrible –– and unmentioned in the mass media, though everyone is thinking it –– happens to Senator Obama. That’s what it’s come to.

Yesterday, Clinton argued that she and not Obama appealed to “hard-working white people,” which presumably means that the rest of us are either not hard-working or are not white. It’s the only argument she’s got left. The states are nearly gone, there are few delegates to gather, and even her own people, in one form or another, are conceding.

I don’t have a personal stake in how history treats Hillary Clinton or her campaign, and it doesn’t matter very much what sort of nonsense she spins out in the last hours of her candidacy, but it will matter and does matter how this campaign paves the way for future women presidential candidates, as well as candidates for lesser offices. America needs to get over its pathetic gender fixations and choose candidates for better reasons than whether or not they have penises. I mean, come on. How grown-up are we?

What Clinton’s candidacy meant to women –– and still means –– has a very important bearing on sexual politics. She needs to withdraw from this campaign with whatever grace and dignity and style she might be able to summon, not only because if she really cares about the things she claims she must cease battering the only candidate remaining who can deliver on them, not only for that reason but for women candidates down the road. That is a legacy which is not yet ruined, but time is running out.