1990s. He could have slaughtered the Clinton record on Hillary's disastrous effort at health care reform, on the trade agreements, on the welfare bill, on the fact that the people who did well in the Clinton era were the rich. He was too innately cautious to play the populist card and he paid the price.

The adulatory press coverage that Obama enjoyed throughout February took the edge off his campaign and left it flat-footed when Hillary had the effrontery to claim Obama had to do the explaining on NAFTA.

Obama was similarly slow to counter Hillary's decision to play the national security card, telling voters America would be safe in either her or John McCain's hands but not those of the young senator. If Obama could not swiftly counter by pointing out that Clinton bought the Bush line on the war hook, line and sinker, doing no independent checking of her own, then his prospects of standing up to McCain don't look too rosy.

In 1968 the anti-war forces came to the convention in Chicago fired with the sense that their candidates, Eugene McCarthy and

Bobby Kennedy, had crushed Hubert Humphrey in the primaries. But just as Richard Daley's police battered the protesters, so the party machine crushed the anti-war forces and forced Humphrey down their throats inside the convention hall. Humphrey was never able to reunite the party and lost to Richard Nixon.

In 1972 the party bosses never accepted George McGovern, who was sabotaged by his own party and the unions and crushed by Nixon in the election.

The Clintons have never confused their own political fortunes with those of the Democratic Party. In 1996 and 1998 Bill Clinton refused to release campaign surpluses from his own war chest to help elect Democrats to the House and the Senate.

Obama's campaign has most certainly rallied blacks and the young to the Democrats. These new recruits will surely melt away as they see the party machine grind the politics of hope in the dirt. McCain couldn't have hoped for a better day.