First, and fundamentally important, there is one central point about the Clintons and their campaigning that every major media outlet in this country has neglected to mention: The Clintons have nothing, absolutely nothing, to offer in terms of policy that could not be offered better and more convincingly by thousands of other Democrats from the level of county executive upward across the nation.

The implicit claim in the news media that the Clintons are somehow The Last of the Democrats, or even very strong small-d democrats, is explainable only as corporate shilling for the last standing corporate mouthpieces, or amnesia.

Bill Clinton was always a so-so Democrat, although back in the Seventies he undoubtedly held a deeply rooted and sincere conviction that he should not go to Vietnam. Hillary Clinton became a so-so Democrat when she invested her lot with Bill Clinton, although she had been a passionate advocate of several causes as an undergraduate and to some extent when she was in law school at Yale.

In heavily Democratic Arkansas, Bill Clinton always competed most intensely against other Democrats. He had to, to win office. It wasn’t the Republicans who threatened him; it was other Dems including Jim Guy Tucker. And William Jefferson Clinton’s way of competing was never to appeal to The People, never to go over the heads of the special interests, in the public interest—this is part of what makes Mrs. Clinton’s current campaign tactic so infuriating—but to present himself to the Chamber of Commerce types downtown as a palatable fallback candidate, come time the inevitable GOP loss.

Needless to say, Hillary Clinton as his wife backed his policies and defended his practices. Furthermore, as I and other writers have pointed out before, her own track record—following a school internship at a leftwing law firm, etc—has in no way been populist. Setting aside if one could her go-along-to-get-along votes in Congress, including authorizing the anti-human-being Iraq war, her entire career in Arkansas, where she was able to pass the bar, was as part of a couple.

At a time when young professionals with advanced degrees were scrambling for any teaching jobs available, when Hillary Rodham finished law school—and failed the bar exam--she was appointed Assistant Professor of Law at the U of Arkansas law school—no legal experience, but she was Bill Clinton’s girlfriend.

(Bill Clinton also taught law, sort of, at Arkansas for a while. He was known for among other things losing an entire class’s stack of papers—reportedly he then negotiated a group grade of B for the whole class, with some exceptions including one of his students who went on to become a federal judge.)

Moving on, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s entire legal career in Arkansas was as the governor’s wife. She went into the downtown (in the Northeast they would call it uptown) Rose law firm, where her work for corporate interests including Wal-Mart is more than amply documented.

Given the perpetual dominance of the Democratic Party in Arkansas up through the Seventies, it is a tribute to Bill Clinton’s misfeasance that he managed not to be re-elected, first time around: For the first time since Reconstruction, after Clinton had been in office for two years, the state elected a Republican governor. Once. Clinton himself then decided with much publicity that his problem was that he was too ‘liberal’—and he set about to rectify that nonexistent fault, wooing and winning enough of the essential moneyed support to return to office the next election.

During his terms in office, Clinton then presided for ten years over the continuing dismantling of all the populist legislation that Arkansas—in common with Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma—had had. Caps on interest rates, restrictions and regulation in money-lending (now renamed ‘credit,’ which if you notice has a much warmer and friendlier sound), restrictions on the ways they can take your house away from you (they call those ‘home equity loans’ among other things), some regulation of the insurance companies, the utility companies, and the railroads—all part of a passing Old Order. All of which, as said, the First Lady of Arkansas went along with, even while vocally proclaiming and touting her own official support for ‘children’ and ‘women.’

In case readers wonder why this cluster of states down near the Border had such a body of legislation in the first place, one broad if slightly reductive answer is that they had to, to compete with Mexico and the territories. Texas was a known debtor’s haven. It needed that rep; otherwise, some settlers would have kept running all the way across the border.

But in deadly seriousness the banks, the insurance companies and the other interests in the finance sector have spent many millions of dollars, over the decades, on lobbying and campaigning to get these laws destroyed, with great success. Only now, in the so-called ‘subprime meltdown,’ does it look as though there may be a chance the pendulum could swing the other way.

No one could count on either Sen. Hillary Clinton or a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton to be a big part of the wave. Aside from the ways her health plan proposes further to enrich Big Insurance—by mandating insurance for all, rather than mandating health care for all—her campaign has been supported chiefly by the financial sector among other corporate interests.

Notwithstanding the mystified bleating over those enigmatic Clintons by Chris Matthews and others, the present condition of the Clinton campaign should be a clue. 1) Sen. Clinton has no mathematical chance of winning the nomination. She cannot win a majority of the delegates, and she cannot win a majority of the popular vote. 2) Much of the money donated to her campaign was earmarked for the general election (so much for her complaints that Other People Wanted This Campaign To Be Over), since Mrs. Clinton herself thought the primary process would be over on Super Tuesday. Thus she loses those moneys when she loses the nomination.

Thus, 3) she is desperate to stay in the race, as long as possible. Given her debts and here previous dodginess in financial reporting, it is unknown how much of her general obligations she will be able to repay. So she continues to draw financial contributions—trying, at this stage, for as much from the Little People as possible, since her big donors are maxed out. And she continues to hope that something bad will happen to Obama, a possibility enhanced by her gun ad with the weapon pointed in the direction of the other candidate’s head.