Politics in the new century?

I have been pondering Hillary Clinton lately. Is she the wave of the future in primary contests? Or is her continued campaign a quirk? Unlike past primary campaigns, where people in her position dropped out or were marginalized/ignored/disregarded (hello, Jerry Brown and Jesse Jackson!), she continues on and, at least for now, is treated as a serious rival.

So, will the future reward candidates with the will and resources to gut it out? Or is she sui generis (as we lawyers like to say)? That is, is this year, because of some admixture of the zeitgeist, somehow unique? Whether it's the historical nature of her role as the first woman with a serious shot at the presidency, the Clinton brand name, her smarts, etc., why is she able to survive where Gary Hart or Al Gore or Paul Tsongas did not? Is she the wave of the future, and from now on -- at least on the Democratic side, with no winner-take-all states, and proportional allocation of delegates -- we will see these sorts of wars of attrition in the future?

It is an axiom that generals want to fight the last war. I think that that was what damaged Team Clinton this year. She and her campaign decided to go for a knock-out blow, just like the way that Kerry crushed Dean early, and Gore squashed Bradley even earlier. The Germans in the early 1900s recalled how their rapid thrust into France in 1870, and their overwhelming victory over MacMahon at Sedan, knocked poor Napoleon III off of his throne and ended the Franco-Prussian War tout suite. Their plan for war in 1914 was a reflection of the 1870 experience, and called for an end-run through Belgium and a turn towards Paris, with the idea of knocking the French out of the war quickly. They came close, but General Gamelin's Paris taxicabs saved the day, and four years of trench warfare followed. Then the Germans lost, and in another 20 years or so we had another example of generals fightling the last war.

Uh, where was I? Ah yes -- fighting the last war. Anyway, it seems that the Clinton campaign thought that she would be the crowned nominee in March, and were unprepared for any primaries following Super Tuesday. Their lack of knowledge regarding the system for awarding delegates in the Texas primary/caucus hybrid was sort of the symptom of the problem with this approach. And recent reports that chief campaign strategist Mark "You Owe Me Big Bucks" Penn reportedly said that Senator Clinton would clinch the nomination when she won California, apparently forgetting that it was not a winner take all state, reinforces this perception of, well, idiocy on the part of people running her campaign.

At any rate, it seems that she was effectively out of the race months ago -- at least by the standards of earlier years -- and yet she shouldered on. And, despite the delegate numbers, she was (and is, still) regarded as having a shot at the nomination. I just wonder, again, whether this is an anomaly or a harbinger of the future.