Ian Bell on the presidency

I surrender my bet. Bloggers can take their virtual money and do (so to speak) virtually anything they virtually like with the windfall. Back during the famous snows of famous New Hampshire I asserted that Hillary Rodham Clinton could take it all the way to the convention. Close but, after Indiana, no cigar.

So it goes. Amid the moral auctions America knows as primary contests, the one certain thing is that certainties are never certain. Clinton should have had this thing sewn up. Equally, John McCain should have been long forgotten. Instead, she has unravelled, stitch by stitch, and a woman will not, I think, occupy the most important role in these Western democracies of ours. A good thing, or a bad?

The last question should be shocking. One should say that having a woman in the slightly-off-centre Office is a self-evidently good idea. On the other limb, I am old enough to remember the ease with which Margaret Hilda Thatcher refuted all the political feminism I once tried so very hard to idealise.

A lack of external procreative tools does not, of itself, confer virtue. There were nasty complications in calling Thatcher a callous bitch - not least because I am fond of dogs - but logic is always true, and vice versa. The insult was accurate.

A Hillary Clinton presidency could have been historic: I get it. Nevertheless, you are reminded of the difference between necessary and sufficient when you hear her issuing threats of military action against Iran, assaulting her rival for failures of faux-patriotism, or pandering to any possible demographic demanding a little light, discreet, pandering.

Her campaign has been dogged, but unpleasant. Senator Obama has been dull - but Senator Clinton has been dirty. The usual version says that this is merely "the Clintons" doing what they do. They fight hard; they never give up; their sheer persistence is part of their charm and their legend. But that bald statement of cussed implacability lays Hillary (so to speak) bare (so to speak).

Her last-hope campaign for super-delegates has turned on the idea - not necessarily mistaken - that Obama is unelectable.

The unspoken facts hardly need stating: he's black; more or less liberal; and he offers a live, uppity, walking target to the psycho constituency of the great and well-armed republic. They call it, even in public discourse, "the N word". Martin, Malcolm, George Jackson and the Panthers died for it.

Clinton has been explicit on some of these topics, to some degree. She is the opposite of a racist. But she has said - again, not necessarily mistaken - that if Obama can't handle her, he won't begin to handle the Republican attack machine, far less the Death Star's "vast right-wing conspiracy".

I am reminded, not for the first time, of William Carlos Williams. He was a New Jersey baby doctor who kept a typewriter in a bottom drawer at the office. Clutching at the moments between appointments with the damaged goods of the American Century, Doc Williams would bash out stories and poems. Some of those altered the way in which Americans think. In the 1920s, Williams wrote certain verses "To Elsie". They began: "The pure products of America/ go crazy "

Did Clinton follow Elsie? Watching the farce of primary politics at the distance of several thousands of miles, I wonder. Was the whole debt-ridden point just to win, or to win for a purpose? Was the point to be democracy's next best hope, or merely to settle a squalid dispute with a disreputable spouse?

The reek of sexism is obnoxious. It functions, indeed, as yet another excuse for men of little brain (fill in your own alternative for diminished organs) to treat every night as fight club night. That doesn't make the question as thoroughly disreputable as William Jefferson Clinton. Who married that? I know who did, and then stuck - a certain stickiness invades every image - with the deal. This is, I think, the essential Hillary issue.

I have only ever seen him twice in what passes for flesh. Once was in Washington, just to justify the wage. He was being impeached, supposedly, because of a girl, a frock and a thing involving the shape of an expensive cigar. In truth (not your usual Clinton phrase) he was being arraigned by his peers for bare-faced lies to a grand jury. All I saw was a bloated face filtered through the smoked armoured glass of a Continental.

The second moment was more interesting. Labour, Blackpool, and otherwise responsible people, male and female, rendered moist just by the ex-presidential presence. This was a trick hidden within other tricks. The first was as follows: Blair didn't get seduced by George Bush; Bill Clinton had the puppy eating from his hand long before. That was parochial news. The second stunt was actually extraordinary.

A hot hall, a hot day. "Bill", socialism's friend, elects not to sweat. Just that. No one cared about the usual boiler-plate words. All anyone wanted to ask was this: how did he do that? "Charisma," said the nu-Lab fans. Instead, the former president made the phrase "no sweat" actual. The contract between the Devil and the Bubba would make for fascinating reading.

So what might that mean? How do all those self-selecting alpha males connect with the levelling idea of democracy? And what might any of it mean to Hillary's own life and career once she has swallowed - no, I can't be bothered with those jokes either - everything?

Gail Sheehy, her best biographer, began a 1999 book, Hillary's Choice, with these words: "When under siege, she rises early, dresses quickly, and cauterizes her emotions." The siege in question involved a plump girl named Lewinsky, and a husband incapable of elementary respect, but the sense of feelings burned and sealed at the stump has been the signature note of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

You knew she wanted it obsessively. But even with the history of gender-oppression hanging over every statement, something was very wrong.

There was the hint, first, of entitlement. She seemed to say that in some sense she had earned the presidency. Dynasty, for her, was always more than soft soap. Equally, it appeared that claiming the White House "in her own right" had more to do with the psycho-dynamics of a marriage than with the needs of a nation. You could call that worrying.

Obama stopped treating her as a straightforward rival, a "formidable intellect", or even as a party dynast, long ago. He began - inadvertently, I think - to regard Clinton as something odd and strange. The seating of disallowed delegates from Florida and Michigan became a receding issue. Her sheer stamina began to seem perverse. Instead, a tragedy was unfolding.

Think of it in these terms: what will Hillary Clinton do with the rest of her life? More importantly, what will become of women in American politics, and in all politics, if her legacy is nothing more than the affirmation of a miserable stereotype? Instinct and experience says that someone will indeed make an attempt on the life of Obama. That sad truth is a measure of the stakes for Democrats, Americans and the rest of us. But if Clinton has this year done more harm than good - my guess - her tragedy has become peripheral.

She could not, as they say, "close the deal" in Indiana. She was clinging on to a thread of hope. Yet her resolve has been astounding. She should, in a perfect world, occupy the second tier on one of those dream tickets we used to hear about. That won't happen. The female part of the Clinton partnership was always the better part. But it's over.

Obama should, in honour, settle all the debts, financial and otherwise. Then he should work out - I won't even guess an ending for this movie - how to destroy the Death Star. The world could live with that.