The Year of the Prisoner

Listening to Hillary Clinton's top aides trying to put a good face on the results of the Indiana primary had the same surreal quality as an aide to Hitler reporting "encouraging news" from Stalingrad. Her candidacy died on May 6. She needed at least a 10 percent win in Indiana, and in the end she scraped through by not much more than 16,000 votes. Every day she stays in the race means more zeroes on her campaign debt, which probably tops $25 million right now, when all the IOUs are counted. Hillary might have to go back into the cattle futures business.

There's talk of Mrs. Clinton telling Obama that the price of concession is that he settle her campaign debt and take her on the ticket. He's got the money, though he should use it for worthier purposes. As for the number-two spot, what does it take to keep the Clintons clear of the White House? A stake through both their hearts? If ever a campaign disclosed low moral and political fiber, it was this one. Bill ended up as a petulant sleazeball and Hillary as a war drum thumper, marching shoulder to shoulder with John McCain.

Prison is the leitmotif of this year's campaign. Obama was--and may remain--the prisoner of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Hillary was the prisoner of her yes-to-war-on-Iraq vote. McCain owes his whole political career to his stint in a prison in Vietnam. Nervous though liberals are of the issue, the real extent of McCain's collaboration with his Vietnamese captors should be a hot issue in the fall. There are more prisoners here per capita than in any country in the world. We have prisons where Americans torture their captives into madness and suicide. America itself is prisoner of the economic philosophy of neoliberalism, dying before our eyes.

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