Sorry, Bernie fans, Hillary Clinton's pre-planned ascension is back on schedule

In the beginning, the conventional wisdom said that Bernie was just a fringe crackpot - a left-wing pipe dream with no real chance of securing the nomination. Clinton had all the money and power on her side so, despite the fact that she's unlikeable and untrustworthy, she became known as an "inevitability." ...Then Iowa and New Hampshire happened.

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Even though Hillary technically won, Iowa was seen as a victory for Bernie. He came within a hair's breadth of taking a state that Hillary should have controlled. Then, Bernie parlayed that momentum into a dominating New Hampshire performance. The left ignored the fact that he was being trounced in terms of pledged delegates and began to argue that "President Bernie" was no longer some crazy, pie-in-the-sky, idea. Allegedly, he could win. That notion was pretty much decimated on Saturday night. Team Hillary is now all but unstoppable. As left-wing rage Slate.com reports, "barring a catastrophe, her nomination is," once again, "inevitable." Bernie is pretty much finished.

He didn’t just have momentum—he was putting money and people into Nevada, the third state on the Democratic nominating calendar after Iowa and New Hampshire, and expanding his outreach to Latino voters. Suddenly, Nevada was in doubt. So much so that Mook issued a memo downplaying Nevada, focusing on South Carolina, and looking forward to the next swath of contests in March.

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It turned out that all of this was unnecessary. On Saturday, Clinton won the Nevada caucuses by a comfortable margin of around 5 points. Yes, the Sanders campaign had made up ground on Clinton, who he noted in his concession speech led him by as many as 25 points in polling in Nevada last month. But that comeback effort wasn’t fast enough to overcome her built-in advantages and deny her a victory. ”The truth is, we aren’t a single issue country” Clinton said in her victory speech, hammering on her most recent line against Sanders. “We need more than a plan for the big banks.”

So, how did this happen? Well, it comes down to what Slate calls "the theory of the race." The idea is that Bernie appeals only to idealistic white hippies and millennials. They pinned their hopes on the belief that he couldn't corral black voters. Basically, as a certain Mr. Herman Cain likes to say, all Democrat presidential races rely on keeping black voters "on the reservation." The official party of race-baiting knows that - should the day come when a Republican (or a non-Democrat like Sanders) can take even a small percentage of "their" black voters - the DNC power structure will be completely undermined. This is why the DNC elites invest a staggering amount of time and effort into labelling every opponent an "ist." Every outsider - regardless of political orientation - is either a sexist, a racist, or some kind of classist. These attacks were tougher to mount against Sanders, but they tried. Bernie, Hillary claimed, is a borderline sexist who isn't particularly interested in addressing systemic racism. This is a little more oblique than what we usually see from team Clinton, but it may have worked. Hillary won, and - as Slate argues - unless blacks abandon her in droves, she'll be the Dems' nominee:

By winning, Team Clinton doesn’t just score delegates—it proves its theory of the race. The Clinton campaign believes that Sanders’ strength and enthusiasm is illusory; that it reflects the peculiar demographics of Iowa and New Hampshire—rural states with few minorities—more than any pro-Bernie tide in the Democratic Party. Nevada, in other words, was a test. If Clinton lost, then it presaged a tighter race in South Carolina and beyond, and possibly one that ended with a Sanders nomination. Now, instead, we have a race that essentially looks like it did in the beginning of the year. Clinton has the advantage, and barring a catastrophic decline with black voters, she’ll march steadily to the nomination.

As I've argued before; if the Democrat primaries were functioning solely 'on the merits' Hillary would probably have been defeated a long time ago. However, the DNC is not doing things 'on the merits.' Contempt for Sanders has been on display since day one. For evidence, you need look no further than the way the party set the debate schedule to benefit Clinton. The fix was in from the start. The fact that someone with Hillary's monumental pile of baggage is still in the race simply boggles the mind. She's also the Dems' worst campaigner since Dukakis. That's impressive, considering that they previously nominated vintage audio-animatronic figures named John Kerry and Al Gore. For the party, though, none of that matters. Bernie will never be allowed to be the Democrat nominee - and Saturday's loss probably sealed his fate.

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