Mrs. Clinton has devoted her adult life to furthering the career of her charming and charismatic husband, serving as his supporter, enabler, and eminence grise. She has suffered public humiliation because of his serial infidelities. She has repressed her highly competitive and testicular personality to play devoted wife, mother and First Lady, and when called upon, she has bedeviled his enemies, carried his water, and deferred her own ambitions.

She has spent the past decade planning and scheming to succeed him in the Oval Office, manufacturing her artful “35 years of experience” slogan in an attempt to infuse her candidacy with suitability. Her every waking moment, her every move has been designed to bring her to a place where she would be bathed in an aura of inevitability, both to her party and to the nation. For several months there, she held in her hands what she had worked so assiduously to cultivate, only to have it snatched from her by legions of younger voters uninterested in her struggle and captivated by the elusive, ineffable celebrity of Barack Obama. She has been trumped by American Idolatry.

Obama enjoys the male Clinton’s gifts of geniality and charisma and has ridden them to the top of the charts. Now his fame has grown to such a state that women swoon at his appearance, a sure sign that the Democratic base has come down yet again with a case of teenage female sexual frenzy. He is fast becoming Sinatra, Ricky Nelson, Bobby Kennedy and the Maharishi all rolled in one, and he is beginning to leave poor Mrs. Clinton fuming in the dust.

She has obviously devoted hundreds of hours to studying the issues and problems of the nation, investing significant monetary assets of her campaign on focus groups and internal polling to tell her what to say and what new government goodies she should offer voters for their support. But even after all that, too often now the wonkish Mrs. Clinton finds her artfully crafted words drowned out by the cacophony that Obama’s platitudinous “hope and change” stump speech engenders wherever he appears.

Though Mrs. Clinton challenges him to detail all the miracles he promises, Obama blithely ignores her and continues to rise inexorably in both polls and delegate count. No wonder she is flailing and foundering, going from one clumsy attack to the next, trying all the while to appear gracious and conciliatory. It’s a hopelessly awkward posture for one such as she, and you feel the urge to avert your eyes anymore when she appears on camera.

Mr. Obama should never cease watching his back. Though the press is quick to declare him the frontrunner and to instill him with inevitability, it was only a few weeks back that Mrs. Clinton was so imbued.

He has attracted a huge following of the young and dewy-eyed. So fresh and untried are they their every thought and utterance seems surrounded by quotation marks. Their phrases, their ideology and their hopeless naiveté speak of the academy and not of the streets. They have no idea just how ugly Democratic street politics can get.

So while their candidate continues to enthrall them with wonderful, youthful and meaningless words – words like “hope” and “change,” so easily displayed on giant LCD screens and stenciled onto glossy blue signs – Mr. Obama’s acolytes had best bone up on some additional vocabulary:  words like “machine,” “brokered convention, “floor fight,” and “credential battles.”

They need to quickly grasp that great liberal platitudes like “Let Every Vote Count” will be turned into a short stabbing weapon when Mrs. Clinton’s thugs come to the floor insisting that Michigan and Florida be seated and counted.   They need to comprehend the long history of Democratic machine politics with its great tools of patronage, bribery and blackmail. There is not a “superdelegate” whose skeletons are unknown to Mrs. Clinton, or whose need for money, power, patronage or downright legal cover is not clearly articulated in detail in her files. This is not a woman who will be stopped by the mere will of the Democratic base – she will rule, or scorch the earth trying.

Look at the audience at a Hillary event. Watch when the camera pans the crowd to see the living definition of the word “grim.” Her supporters do not love her because she is Hillary, they cling to her because she is Woman and this is their final and best chance to matter on the planet Earth. Their aging angry visages lined with decades of battles with men, dour in countenance and furious at being challenged by a competing Democratic constituency at the very moment of triumph, these harpies are not about to yield to callow youth brimming with enthusiasm for a political rock star of little substance. These women and their leader have an agenda, and this creaky antique Feminism will not be denied by some vapid American Idol like Barack Obama. These are the post-menstrual mothers of the nation, half Cindy Sheehan and half Mother Jones, and they will happily drown their children in blood before they will give in to their naïve vanities.

Obama and his supporters take comfort from the fawning pronouncements of circus performers like Chris Matthews and Charlie Gibson at their peril. There is NOTHING inevitable about Obama and there will not be until the head is cut off the Gorgon and buried - a task not easily accomplished as Perseus learned. I wonder if Obama understands the peril he is in – it is clear his young devotees do not: they are given to singing too loudly, dancing too happily and foolishly thinking their own rapture infectious and not just annoying to those who have to listen to it.

Tens of millions of voters alive today have no idea who Jack Kennedy was. For them, JFK’s name just captions the portrait of a handsome vibrant man in an exclusive list of 43 names; distinctive primarily for being in the forlorn subset of those murdered in office.  Vast segments of the population have no idea of what it felt like to live in America under his administration.

The Obama/Kennedy Show this week was targeted at those who can and do remember. The Camelot Gambit has one purpose only:  to utilize the vast nostalgia for the Kennedy years to target and siphon off Hillary’s loyal core of support.  Poll after poll shows the only genuine enthusiasm for her candidacy coming from the millions of women who were in their teens during or shortly after the Kennedy years.  They mourned John, lost their virginity, mourned Bobby and Martin, turned on, tuned in and dropped out during the Summer of Love.  Then the New Age dawned. They bought beaded curtains and herbal teas, took LSD, hiked braless in Big Sur, communed with the Maharishi, smoked a lot of reefer and got laid even more during the early 70s.

But as soon these women started hitting their 30s a sense of betrayal began seeping in alongside all the carefree fun.  Suddenly, it dawned on them that the drugs, the rock and roll, the men pretending to be sensitive and counterculture and the whole damned Age of Aquarius was pretty much just a big goof to get their pants off.  They realized that so much of that idealistic blather had been used to get sex and then to shut them up. They got angry and got feminist.  Some became Lesbians, but mostly they just got royally ticked off.  Now in the early 21^st Century, most have reached that stage in life where they are jaded and sick to death of feeling manipulated by men.

Now comes Hillary Rodham Clinton, a woman wronged, a woman who seems to have no use for men or sex, who is a tad on the dikey side; a woman, like them, of a certain age – but powerful, hostile to male dominance, and within reach of the biggest prize on Earth.  They cling to her like mildew to wet laundry. The only way forces favorable to Obama can peel away that loyalty is to appeal to the abiding nostalgia we all have for our youth and innocence. Politically, the nostalgia of older women is anchored to their loving and idealized memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  Still, this ploy could never work except for the general distaste among Americans for the sleaze and nastiness of the Clintons.  One suspects that even among her most ardent supporters there is the unspoken wish she were somebody else.

The Camelot Gambit, whether successful or not, will be over and done with soon enough.  Media people, misunderstanding the short-term nature of the stratagem, foolishly blather on about torches being passed and the nouvelle New Generation.  Pay no attention; that’s just the typical overcooked Malt-o-Meal that comes gushing out of the average cliché-ridden news person’s mouth today.  They don’t get that this is just an interesting ploy by the Kennedys to try and take out the trash once and for all. 

It could work.