Latino Laughter

Tuesday, March 4th 2008, 1:27 AM

Appleton/News

Hillary Clinton addresses rally held in airport hangar in Beaumont, Tex., Monday.

Barack Obama may not put away Hillary Clinton for good Tuesday night. And that would mean the political equivalent of Groundhog Day between now and the Pennsylvania primary: seven more weeks of her trying to convince voters that she should be the one working the switchboard at the White House if the bogeyman calls.

But the best thing for her party would be if Obama does knock her out - voters sending the message that people across the country have been trying to send for months, that this is his time and not hers.

And that it is time for her to go.

Nobody should ever count out a Clinton. Are you insane? They are, husband and wife, the Ty Cobb of modern American politics. Once, when Cobb couldn’t settle his differences with an umpire named Billy Evans, he waited for Evans after the game and beat him silly. Those were Clinton politics before they were ever Karl Rove politics. If you can’t win the game, win the fight.

Everybody counted out Bill Clinton after we found out about Gennifer Flowers, the first of his prom queens, in 1992. He still ended up serving eight years in the White House.

This time, everybody counted out his wife after the Iowa caucus. Even now, even after losing 11 straight states and sometimes looking as bad as the New York Knicks doing it, she comes into tonight with a chance.

There is a doomsday scenario for Obama - though not the one in Clinton’s red-phone commercials - where she can still pull this off. She wins Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania, then she goes back to Florida and Michigan for what would essentially be do-overs, those states having been stripped of their delegates to the Democratic convention for moving up their primaries. If she somehow does all that, it would be something much more serious than a miracle.

It would mean that the old way of doing things still holds.

But then Hillary Clinton has wanted to be old politics and new politics from the start. Maybe that is why she has sounded like somebody new every couple of days, especially once she fell behind.

Right now she is the Democratic candidate who tells voters in states she needs that she is the only one who can really keep them safe. You saw how well that message worked for Rudy Giuliani.

Now you see what happens when she isn’t running for the U.S. Senate against Rick Lazio or some former mayor of Yonkers, but is up against somebody like Obama.

She wants you to believe now that the media is part of the reason that she is in this fix, has even gotten the media, which will go for any kind of easy story, to tell that one on themselves. Only the media hasn’t done this to her. Barack Obama has. He did it by reading this campaign and this election season better than she did before the season officially began.

Obama is the one who didn’t need wildly expensive polling to tell him that dissatisfaction with government in this country rides as high as 65%. It isn’t just because of a lame-duck President and an administration as cynical and dishonest as any we have ever had, and that includes Richard Nixon’s. It is also because of 20 years of having either a Bush or Clinton in the White House.

From the start, Obama hasn’t been running against her as much as he has been running against that.

“We have to fundamentally change the way we govern,” Obama said at St. Peter’s College not long ago, giving the speech he gives everywhere, one that had college kids waiting near the door outside, hoping for the gym door to open so they could hear him for even 15 seconds. And if you don’t think those kids matter in this election, you are as rock-headed about the country as some of the geniuses running the Clinton campaign have been.

James Carville, a Clinton loyalist, said on television Sunday that if she manages to win Texas and Ohio that the “narrative changes” in this campaign. It would be perfect, in a way, just because her narrative has changed constantly over the past two months. Obama’s has not.

There is a wonderful line in the late Jack Newfield’s book about Robert F. Kennedy called “Robert F. Kennedy: A Memoir.” In it, Newfield talks about how Kennedy was late getting into the Democratic race in 1968, how it should have been him going after Lyndon Johnson in New Hampshire and not Eugene McCarthy.

“So Robert Kennedy, despising the war and the President, nevertheless [said], with great guilt and uncertainty, that no, he could not do this thing,” Newfield wrote. “Robert Kennedy, the imperfect politician, had misread the temper of this time.”

Obama has made no such mistake, even if he is an imperfect politician as well. He knows you run on one thing now and that is change. She wanted to talk about change but run like an incumbent, as if we were coming right out of the ’90s instead of eight years of Bush and Cheney. The media didn’t misread the temper of these times. Or miss the call on that. She did.