Here's a "small" thing that has begun to bother me lately: I get emails from both the Clinton campaign as well as Obama's. I've seen them both speak in person, and have emailed RSVPs from their site, so I am on those lists now—the ones asking for money as well as telling you where they are going next, as well as their thoughts on recent polls, or media incidents/blowups.

And if you also get these emails, maybe you've also noticed that while Obama's (lesser number of emails) are in sync with his public message and press releases, Clinton's feel like a secret conversation that is often at odds with her public statements and messages. It adds up to the impression of disingenuousness, or duplicity. The campaign releases a McAuliffe statement that there will be a nominee by June, etc, and then the line in the emails is "we'll never give up" and so on. I trust the emails more than I do the MSM chatter, even when surrogates or campaign staff interview on TV (McAuliffe with the whole "there will be a new nominee, calm down, we're not going to disrupt anything" shtick).

The Clinton emails have been consistently saying "we're never giving up, we're going to win this" etc. The press presentation and image of Clinton has wavered side to side more than ten paper Kerrys on a sailboard in a storm. She'll be whatever you will vote for. She'll say whatever will get the Democratic party off her back, but the whole time she's planning on taking it all the way. The way to what? To the conclusion of victory that the Clinton campaign can't see around.

And this insanity she was spouting in Florida about her run and the MI/FL delegates being seated to her satisfaction akin to the Civil Rights struggle? It's just too much, isn't it? You hardly know what to say. It certainly doesn't tamp down the "hysterical" meme that her supporters and feminists alike despise. It doesn't do much to dispel the "do anything to win" shape that she has carved out so well in the minds of so many. It doesn't do much to negate the "self-serving at the expense of the party" accusation.

But dig this:

The Field can now confirm, based on multiple sources, something that both campaigns publicly deny: that Senator Clinton has directly told Senator Obama that she wants to be his vice presidential nominee, and that Senator Obama politely but straightforwardly and irrevocably said “no.” Obama is going to pick his own running mate based on his own criteria and vetting process.

And that is all that anybody needs to know to understand the childish and wounded behavior of Senator Clinton yesterday, grandstanding hypocritically to senior citizens in Florida, telling them they should consider themselves under sniper fire in Bosnia, er, Zimbabwe, aggrandizing herself as some kind of civil rights leader (MLK? or LBJ? She didn’t say this time) and attempting to corner 30 members of the DNC’s Rules & Bylaws Committee that will meet on May 31 to resolve the disputes over whether, and, if so, how, delegates from Michigan and Florida might be seated at the convention in August.

And as a sidenote on the whole "disenfranchising" theme that the Clintons are inflaming their supporters with, I give you the Chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign two years ago:

From McAuliffe's own book:

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They thought I was bluffing. But it was my responsibility as chairman to take action for the good of the party, and taking away half their delegates was well within my authority. Now all the presidential candidates were upset. They were getting calls from Iowa and New Hampshire asking them to pledge to come to their states no matter what Michigan did, putting the candidates in an impossible position. The whole primary calendar was in danger of spinning out of control. The candidates kept calling me and asking what was happening with the schedule, and I made it clear that I was not going to let Michigan throw the entire process out of whack. Finally I'd had enough and scheduled a meeting in Carl's Senate office for April 2 to settle this once and for all.

As I was escorted into Carl's office with my staff, Debbie Dingell and Carl's chief of staff, David Lyles, were already sitting there waiting with Carl. Sparks flew when I sad down with Phil McNamara and Josh Wachs and immediately complained about all the leaks to the press, which led to finger-jabbing and shouting back and forth between various people in the meeting. Soon, Carl and I were going at it.
"I'm going outside the primary window," he told me definitively.
"If I allow you to do that, the whole system collapses," I said. "We will have chaos. I let you make the case to the DNC, and we voted unanimously and you lost."
He kept insisting that they were going to move Michigan up on their own, even though if they did that, they would lose half their delegates. By that point Carl and I were leaning toward each other over a table in the middle of the room, shouting and dropping the occasional expletive.
"You won't deny us seats at the convention," he said.
"Carl, take it to the bank," I said. "They will not get a credential. The closest they'll get to Boston will be watching it on television. I will not let you break this entire nominating process for one state. The rules are the rules. If you want to call my bluff, Carl, you go ahead and do it."
We glared at each other some more, but there was nothing much left to say. I was holding all the cards and Levin knew it.
"Well, that was a good meeting," I told my shell-shocked staff on the way out of Carl's office.

[Source: McAuliffe, Terry. "What A Party!", pp. 324, 325.]

—mydd.com

Here's me, 20 de Febrero:

This is, I'd muse, the point where The Cling-ons either embrace the zeitgeist or begin to rack up some very negative feelings against themselves that will stick around for a while. This moment very well may be their last chance to be "good losers" and step away as if with their own will.

Will they take it?

No. My guess is that the Clingons are going to carry this forward until they are soundly and inarguably and embarrassingly beat, and in public, and at that point people will be so annoyed with them for putting everyone through their personal quest to redecorate the White House that nobody will even be there to sympathize.

—Ten for Ten, UMX blog

I was wrong about having nobody to sympathize with them, but not really. Because this is hardly over yet. It's too soon to return to that prediction. But I'm sure no matter how it goes down, the Clintons will have a good amount of people ready to be incensed. And it seems HRC doesn't mind whipping them up into a fury. As Al Giordano pointed out above, we see what she is doing with the rejection.

It makes this post, published before the Field's revelation, seem prescient.

Hillary's rhetoric of the past 24 hours has gone from conciliatory to cataclysmic, turning on a high-speed dime like some UFO over the Florida swamps. An awful lot of Democrats are shocked and outraged at her use of civil rights rhetoric over the primary dispute, especially after winning two primaries with the help of some white voters who admitted their choice was influenced by race.1

Some are suggesting a personality shift explains the change of tone, but she's cooler and smarter than that. It's more likely that this sudden transformation is premeditated, brought on by a simpler and more ruthless motive: She's demonstrating to Obama and the superdelegates what she's capable of doing if she's crossed.

—Hillary's Hostage Crisis

Hillary is Rocky all right. Once he dons the black Spidey Suit.

Well. I think the next few weeks should prove very interesting!