On Hillary's exit

New York Magazine:

The Hillary I encounter a few minutes after Obama leaves the building [at the AIPAC summit June 4] is somber, prideful, dark-humored, aggrieved, confused -- and still high on the notion that she is leading an army, Napoleon in a navy pantsuit and gumball-size fake pearls. . . .
"The real lesson of the campaign is that neither my base nor his base alone is sufficient for a general election," she tells me. "That's important to stress, because now we need to look to November and how we put together a winning majority. We've gotta get this coalition to work together, because clearly the Republicans have been more successful at picking off the people who voted for me, and that's exactly who they’re going after again."

The astute reader will detect a dismissive, contemptuous tone in John Heileman's article (you should read the whole thing) and I suppose he's not alone in that attitude. Every time I showed up on the campaign trail to cover Hillary (in Greensburg, in Harrisburg, in Shepherdstown) I was struck by how hostile the press was toward her. Many of the reporters seemed to resent the fact that she wouldn't just quit and let Obama have the nomination.

I am not the type to throw around words like "misognynist," but thinking back on it, it does seem like some of the most hostile treatment Hillary got from the press -- I'm particularly thinking of one surly, bearded CBS reporter who showed up at Shepherdstown -- came from male reporters. And there was that bit with the manly Tim Russert.

It's as if those reporters doubted Hillary's power, or her willingness to wield power for her own purposes. As if they really didn't believe that Hillary would be willing to take her campaign all the way to Denver, or that she might be less than enthusiastic about rallying her disgruntled supporters to the Obama banner, knowing that it was only because of the media and the (disproportionately male) superdelegates that she'd been denied the nomination.

Heh. Just you wait, buckos. Hillary's got about $30 million in campaign debt, and I'm thinking she'll get a lot more contributions for her debt-relief fund if Obama loses than if he wins. Then she'll be the "I told you so" candidate, the ticket to ride for 2012, and she's going to make you sexist swine crawl. And the same goes for turncoat sellouts like Patti.

So go ahead and cheer for Obama, fellas. If you're not cheering on Nov. 5, just remember how you dissed Hillary. Hell hath no fury . . .

UPDATE: Jason Horowitz:

A former bundler to Hillary Clinton just called in to tell me that Barack Obama's selection of Patti Solis Doyle as chief of staff to the campaign's eventual vice presidential nominee is the "biggest f--- you I have ever seen in politics."
The donor, speaking on background, said that everyone in Clinton circles knows the two have hard feelings towards one another and haven't spoken since Clinton removed Solis Doyle as campaign manager, and that Clinton loyalists view her with deep suspicion and believe that she is shopping around a book deal and acted as a background source for an extremely harsh Vanity Fair piece about Bill Clinton.

Hey, Patti, try to see if you can finish this sentence: "Payback's a b----."