Hillary Clinton and Deus ex Machina--UPDATED

Just hanging around to see what happens. You mind?--In ancient Greek drama, when a playwright could not figure a way out of his plot, he resorted to a trick. One of the gods would descend on the stage, lowered by a crane, and intervene, rescuing the hero--and the playwright. It was called deus ex machina, god from a machine.

Apparently, it works in politics as well. In an eye-popping statement, Hillary Clinton justified her staying in the race, because, well, you never know what might happen. Bobby Kennedy, she pointed out, was assassinated in June.

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said to the editorial board of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader in South Dakota. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

When it was clear within hours that she had really stepped in it, she came out with a classic Washington passive-apology. If anyone was offended, I'm sorry. IF. Actually, everyone was offended or should have been and the right response should have been, "oh, dear, I really screwed up. I'm tired and wasn't thinking and said something terrible and I'm sorry." Instead, the moral equivalent of "I didn't inhale."

The problem with the latter is that, while obviously all three candidates are tired and need a rest badly, she has said it before, using the word "assassinate" to a Time magazine editor in March and using the reference without the word repeatedly since. One would forgive the error if it was the o

nly time it happened, but it wasn't. The excuse given by subdued supporters was that it was only an historic reference. She could have used any number of other historic references.

Now no sane person believes she is rooting for Barack Obama to get killed. But the great unspoken--unspoken by the usually voluble chattering class--is the great fear that exactly that would happen. Obama received Secret Service protection well before any other candidate, the moment the death threats began, and the fear that some lunatic, threatened by the ascension of a black man to the candidacy of a major American political party, would take matters into his or her own hands, pervades the campaign. Every reporter covering him is aware of it. For someone as politically savvy as she is to discuss it as a reason for staying in the race is more than peculiar.

She is staying in the race, in part, because she is hoping for deus ex machina. She is hoping Obama will say something really stupid, or that something really awful, like the Rev. Wright controversy, will pop up to convince the super delegates he is not a tenable candidate, or.... Well, someone said something stupid.

One has the sad vision of Willy Mays in a Mets uniform, a once great player, now reluctant to admit his time has passed, holding on to the shadow of what he once was and humiliating himself in public. Her time has now passed. In the words of the late, great Oliver Cromwell: "In the name of God, go!"

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Poblano, the anonymous statistician whose predictions on the primaries, based entirely on demographics, have been remarkably accurate--more accurate than the polls, has figured out what would have happened if Michigan had a real primary, following the rules. The answer is that Obama would have won by 4 points. Clinton better not push Michigan too far.

Overall, we project that Obama would have carried Michigan by a narrow margin -- about 4.0 percentage points or 80,000 votes. After accounting for delegates awarded at the statewide level, we project him to win 65 Michigan delegates to Clinton's 63. Certainly, there is some margin for error in these calculations, and Clinton could certainly have won the state herself. But it would undoubtedly have been very close. Interestingly, if you take the average of the winning margins in Indiana (Clinton by 1.2 points), Ohio (Clinton by 8.7) and Wisconsin (Obama by 17.3), you come up with an average of Obama by 2.5 points, which is very close to our estimate.