KEY POINTS:
She must go on, she can't go on, she'll go on.
As Hillary Clinton persists in her pursuit of the Democratic nomination - whether through the hubristic belief that she alone can rescue the fortunes of her party and indeed America (even as she destroys them) or because ceding defeat would rob her of all self-definition - it nevertheless seems unlikely that the party's convention at the end of August will turn into the superdelegate shit storm that at one point beckoned. Clinton may continue through to the end of the primary season, but her campaign manager, Terry McAuliffe, has said the superdelegates will have done their worst before the convention meets.
Oh well, it will be a dramatic enough event, as American political conventions always are - which is why magazines are so quick to dispatch to them the likes of Martin Amis (who covered the 1988 Republican convention for Esquire - reprinted in Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions) and Andrew O'Hagan (who covered both the Republican and the Democratic conventions for the London Review of Books in 2004).
It will be good fodder, too, for Jon Stewart's The Daily Show (broadcast here on C4): informed, ironic, shrewd, sarcastic - and quite possibly the best political programme ever produced. (That it could be produced in the United States being a source of constant wonder.)
But the 2008 Democratic convention isn't going to be The Best Man, Gore Vidal's 1960 play and then 1964 film of convention horsetrading and backstabbing.
A shame - dramatically speaking, you understand, rather than, you know, for the good of the American people, the Iraqi people, the rest of the world's people, etc, etc, blah blah blah.
Because for a while there, the convention - in (how perfect) the Pepsi Center in Denver - was shaping up to be The Best Man (or woman) and more.
Notwithstanding real life, American presidential elections in general - away from the convention centres - have given rise to plenty of fictional drama, from Garry Trudeau and Robert Altman's hilarious HBO spoof documentary series Tanner 88 (and its somewhat less hilarious 2004 sequel, Tanner on Tanner) to the more refracted 1999 movie Election starring Reese Witherspoon. The election in this case being for class president in a high school.
More refracted still, there is the 1975 film Shampoo starring Warren Beatty. As a hairdresser.
Though it's about a Senate election not a presidential one, you might also consider The Candidate , the 1972 movie starring Robert Redford (just look at how much Wikipedia has to say about it ), and then there is Bob Roberts.
But, really, these are all mere pretenders to the crown - or the White House. For when it comes to American politics, there is only one place to go, for elections as for everything else, and that is The West Wing. It is the American political life that never was, that could never be - but which is remarkably comforting when you see the American political life that actually was, that actually is.
You want a thrilling, dramatic Democratic convention - try Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) being nominated on the fourth ballot at the end of season six.
Forget Barack Obama and John McCain (come on, we all know it's going to be Barack Obama and John McCain), go get season seven out of your local DVD store and settle in for the long haul with Matt Santos and Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda).
By the end of it, you will be scanning photographs of Obama's entourage and wondering where the hell Josh Lyman is when you need him.
