I WAS thinking back 40 years to when I first started observing Hillary Rodham, now Clinton. She was idealistic on civil rights; she wanted to energise young people into and for good politics, all those good things now associated, yes, with Barack Obama. On the Wellesley Campus where I knew her, she stood out for principled stands and carried a good argument wherever she went.

By chance I was re-reading Freud the other day and was reminded how easily public people lose the reality principle. They simply lose their grip. The first sign is that they come to confuse the interests of the whole, of everyone, with their own, as if it's a given. Reality gives way to entitlement. It's the way Hillary has been, reportedly, gathering superdelegates to her US$6 million (RM19 million) mansion a stone's throw from -- ah, yes -- the vice-presidential mansion, and telling them that her concern about Obama is not "against" him, it's "for" the nation. She's "afraid" for the nation if someone so inexperienced in foreign affairs should be thrust into national leadership.

Oh, and what, Hillary, is your experience there? Evading bullets in Bosnia? Or is it the peace process in Ireland, which the Irish leadership now confesses she only passed cookies for? Come on, Hillary, get real. You learn a lot more about the principles of foreign affairs organising minorities on Chicago's South Side than giving tours of the White House. Read Obama's Dreams from My Father to learn about the principles and needs of foreign affairs.

True, Hillary has been an excellent senator -- of New York. She's mastered its ethnic politics, switching her initial instinct back in her early days in the White House, to gain fairness for Palestine, to unswerving subservience to the you-know-what lobby that donates more than half her kitty.

I guess she planned her senatorial run from day two of Bill's presidency, after someone whispered in her ear that if she ever mentioned the PLA again in favourable terms she was dead meat. But one can hardly gainsay that she's done a lot for New York.
But now it's become pathetic. She has lost the race for the nomination. Running a positive campaign without using any of the long history of dirt about her public life, Senator Obama has uplifted American politics and put her to shame, and each day, the maths of her winning diminishes.

The bookie odds now are down to four per cent. "Support for Clinton Wanes as Obama Sees Finish Line", the New York Times headlined, along with news that she had to cough up US$5 million from that US$109 million fortune she and Bill, the non-elitists, have amassed.

It is time for her to get a grip. One hears that, in addition to former presidential nominee George McGovern's call for her to get out, former president Jimmy Carter and former vice-president Al Gore plan to knock on her door and say, "Hillary, it's time..."

The next phase is reconciliation of the party. Once she does regain the reality principle, then she should well recall the experience of the man Bill and she used to put down Obama in South Carolina -- all but costing them the black vote: Lyndon Baines Johnson. It was my first convention: Los Angeles 1960, a Stanford freshman, I arrived at the hall to see headlines that "LBJ spurns Vice-Presidency". He commented that no one would want to trade his job, Senate majority leader, which he'd turned into the country's second most powerful, for the ceremonial one of vice-president.

Once he knew he'd lost his shot at the presidency, he made sure the winner, the young Jack Kennedy, knew full well that support from Texas and the Senate depended precisely on his being, ah yes, vice-president.

And so it worked. "I don't care what the title on the door of my office is," he said with grovelling hypocrisy, "I just want to serve my country." Ah yes. Lots of dead people voted in Texas that November, and with all likelihood Kennedy wouldn't have won otherwise. Nor would Lyndon have ever become president. Had he not been put on the ticket all hell would have broken loose.

Now it's Hillary's turn. Bill will remind her that the vice-presidency is just a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, and they'll both be thinking about how long the first black president will survive. And the vice-president's mansion has hectares of gardens, beating hers by far, just over the knoll.

Will Obama invite her onto the ticket? There will be immense pressure for him to do so. Hillary and Bill, like the scene in The Godfather, will come around in great pain to kiss Obama's hand in the anointment scene, but he won't be fooled. That experience on the South Side will stand good for telling him who truly will work with him for the national good. She'll be trying to undercut him at every turn. She has shown a nastiness in her run unequalled in modern American politics, she has personalised the race into one of her ego versus the forces of black evil.

She doesn't deserve the position and he will win without her. All the things that detracted from his primary runs will stand him in good stead against McCain: he has looked presidential and this will now count, he has appealed above partisanship and now needs independents. Hillary and Bill have just been too partisan -- and too squalid, in the way they have jabbed at him and tried to trip him up. And worst of all, they failed to recognise when the jig was up, Arkansas is a good place for them to retire.