The ‘End of Camelot.’ Really. Truly. Done. Over. Kaput. Nil. Nada. Zip.

THE SLOWEST DEATH IN POLITICS HAS BEEN THE LONG, SAD DECLINE OF A FAMILY WHO ONCE PROUDLY CLAIMED THE CROWN OF CAMELOT FOR THEMSELVES. After Tuesday’s Democratic delivery of California and Massuchusetts delegates to Hillary Rodham Clinton, I think it’s safe to say that "Camelot" really is dead and, finally, ought to be buried.

According to Wikipedia, Camelot "is the most famous fictional castle and court" associated with the legendary King Arthur…[And a]s a place is associated with ideals like justice, bravery and truth, the virtues Arthur and his knights embody in the romances.” The term became synonymous with the heartbreaking love affair America had with John F. Kennedy, the handsome playboy president who was assassinated in November 1963.

Kennedy’s traumatic murder was deemed "The End of Camelot" for the nation. Yet for others,"Camelot only ended" after the shooting death of JFK’s brother Bobby during his run for U.S. president. "As I took a turn standing over the coffin to brace it against the swaying of the train,… and watched the silent crowds lining the tracks, the strongest emotion I felt was wanting the trip not to end. Whatever it was, we knew it was over," wrote Adam Yarmolinsky in the Virginia Quarterly Review in August, 1996.

After that, John’s wife Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy assumed all the winsome glamour of the Kennedy name. The beautiful, jetsetting widow of America’s most handsome president remarried an oil tycoon named Aristotle Onassis, briefly escaped to Greece, and raised her two children. When that marriage went sour, Jackie returned to New York, where she eventually became an editor at Viking Press and later, Doubleday. And of course when she died in 1994, newspaper headlines asked the question, "Is This the End of Camelot?" "…With her passing ends an era of hope, promise and ideals known to an entire generation as Camelot," wrote one journalist in the Sacramento Observer.

But that speculation was in error. We still had the life and eventual death of John F. Kennedy Jr., whose natural charm, good looks and bloodline burdened him with the impossibly-high expectations of America’s romantic love. And when he died in a plane crash, well, that was, once again, "the end of Camelot."

Who knew that almost a decade later Camelot would once again be resurrected, this time in the embodiment of Caroline Kennedy as well as Uncle Teddy, and cousins Patrick and Maria Shriver. In a widely ballyhooed op-ed piece for the New York Times, Caroline endorsed Senator Obama for President. "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them,” Caroline wrote. "But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans." The endorsing Kennedy clan turned out Sunday for a heady last-minute California rally on behalf of Obama. And, for a minute in time, it seemed that Camelot would live again.

But then Californians voted Tuesday, and Hillary beat Obama by 10 percent. And in Massachusetts, the spread was even wider: Hillary’s won 56 percent to Obama’s 41 percent. As they wrote in Cape Cod Today online, "It looks like the half century reign of Camelot has ended in Massachusetts."

And so now, finally, we need to either to bury the "Camelot" Kennedy cliche, or perhaps revive it for the Clintons. May I dare to ask: Are the Clintons the rightful heirs of the Camelot crown?

Florida and the Disenfranchised Voter

HAVE THE DEMOCRATS SHOT THEMSELVES IN THE BIG TOE? It wouldn’t be the first time. But when national leaders stripped the state of its delegates for moving up its primary to January 29, in essence it also stripped the 2.5 million Democrats who turned out to vote in yesterday’s contest of their right to cast a ballot. That means that Hillary will get to crow about her roust of Obama, winning 50 percent of votes cast to Barak’s 33 percent, but won’t get to add any delegates to her column. As Obama’s Barack Obama spokesman Bill Burton wrote gleefully to reporters Tuesday night, "Obama and Clinton tie for delegates in Florida. 0 for Obama, 0 for Clinton."

Yet in this hotly contested historic race between the "woman" and the "black," it’s easy to imagine that the final delegate count could be within the 185 that Donkey Party leaders have stripped from Florida’s voters. And that would be an awkward postscript for the Party that has rightly claimed that Florida’s votes were stolen by the Republicans in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. "This whole thing here is a joke," John Taylor, a Jacksonville schoolteacher told The Nation last November. "How stupid the Democrats are-we’re shooting ourselves in the foot!…They stole two elections, and now we’ve been working six years to make sure that don’t happen again. And the Democrats screw us!"

Perhaps all 2.5 million votes will be moot after Super Tuesday’s 24-state lottery and the 185 Florida delegates won’t make a difference in the end. But my guess is that’s just wishful thinking.

Can Obama Eradicate Race As a Topic in National Elections?

I APOLOGIZE UP FRONT FOR HAVING THE GALL to second-guess the famed and erudite polemicist Christopher Hitchens who asked this week in Slate if "isn’t there something pathetic and embarrassing" about the nation’s obsession with Senator Barack Obama’s race. Hitchens then goes on to lampoon white America’s guilt-ridden swoon over Obama, Republican Alan Keyes for his past "are you black enough?" challenge to the Illinois Senator, and even Obama’s Chicago church for its pander to members who remain "true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization." And if he’s fuzzy on the nuances of what makes a man of mixed-race "black," I highly recommend reading biracial author David Matthews’s essay in Radar on this year’s election. All this to say: Pardon my insolence, but does it not seem as though Mr. Hitchens has answered his own question?

The fact that Hitchen’s column was published January 7, the day before Obama’s loss in the New Hampshire primary, may well be significant. For it’s only the day after the nation’s first primary that Obama’s race actually became a part of the public dialogue, and small wonder. Despite polls show Obama leading with double digits, Hillary won Tuesday, Obama lost, and the nation’s pollsters imploded. Up until then, few in the media had actually openly posed the question of whether America would vote for a black man (or woman, for that matter) as President of the United States, perhaps fearing that the question itself was archaic, that the nation had advanced so much in just 50 years that the point was moot.

May I suggest there was also fear, for the issue of race in America is one of — if not the — most complex and intractable problems that the country faces, and one that the media perpetually avoids. The post-game quarterbacking over what went wrong with the polls started immediately, and among the issues raised was whether white America suppresses the truth about how race plays into its voting. Historically, this has been known as "the Bradley effect", the phenomenon in which black candidates have polled to win but ultimately lose the election, ostensibly because white voters have hidden their true biases from questioners. But already comes denial in the media that race could have been a factor in Obama’s loss. No matter that the contest occurred just days after Golf Channel’s Kelly Tilghman suggested that opponents of golf great Tiger Woods "might have to lynch him in a back alley." Or that it was a brief few months ago that TV and radio provocateur Don Imus was kicked off the air for referring to the Rutgers University’s basketball team as "nappy-head hos." Or that the U.S. Supreme Court last summer ruled that "race cannot be a factor in the assignment of children to public schools", vexing both black and white public school parents, and confounding the issue of racial preference in competitive schools. Or that performer and comedian Bill Cosby and Harvard Professor Alvin F. Poussaint have ignited controversy in black communities for daring to suggest that African Americans must eschew a victim mindset. Pardon the pun, but I’m only going skin deep on the rehashing of racial controversies.

It’s about time that the issue of race is dealt with honestly in this presidential race, and in America at-large. Hitchen’s mock impatience with the idea that race still matters on both sides of the color line belies our nation’s reality. The media should not do us the disservice of pretending it isn’t.

Thank You New Hampshire for Creating a Race

IT TOOK 16 YEARS IN THE NATIONAL SPOTLIGHT FOR Hillary Clinton to show cracks in the facade. Being of sound intellectual and moral constituency, Hillary is the type that probably resisted advice from political handlers to show her "softer side." Yes, she highlighted her hair, began wearing better cut outfits for her middle-aged figure, but the idea of showing emotion was a double-edged sword. She was a woman and the Democratic front-runner for president, and shedding tears was the last thing that anybody would prescribe to win office. After all, Hillary has spent her lifetime fighting the stereotype of the emotional woman, and crying in front of the public might reinforce those biases. And then there was that political lesson learned when Edmund Muskie was derailed in the 1972 election for allegedly crying over dirty attacks against his wife Jane.

But the day before the New Hampshire primary, when the prize seemed to be slipping away to a handsome Senator from Illinois with a storied upbringing, Hillary dared to show feeling. She did not spill what I would characterize as tears, but for the first time the tough public face fell to show a vulnerable side. And while Tuesday night’s talking heads said that glimpse beneath the mask made no difference in Tuesday’s outcome, that in fact Democratic loyalists had their minds made up for weeks, here’s my bet that it will serve her well in upcoming primaries.

In Candidates’ Post-Primary Speeches, the Music was the Message E

VEN THROUGH THEIR CHOICES FOR CAMPAIGN MUSIC, the candidates reveal their divide. HILLARY DECLARED that there "Ain’t No Mountain High Enough" to keep her from the race with the help of the old Supremes’ song, and that she was an "American Girl," at least so far as how Tom Petty describes one.

BARACK OBAMA told supporters that they looked "beautiful" last night through the music of U2’s "City of Blinding Lights."

JOHN EDWARDS invited everyone to come up for "The Rising," with the help of Bruce Springsteen’s spiritual.

And BILL RICHARDSON alluded to tearing down walls through the words in U2’s "Where The Streets Have No Name."

On the Republican side, JOHN MCCAIN, who gave a heartfelt victory speech, pulled no punches and let voters know that he was "Gonna Fly Now," the Rocky theme song.

MITT ROMNEY played it close to his heart invoking the "Dirty Water" of the Charles river, a song played by several artists.

And MIKE HUCKABEE borrowed glitz from Elvis’s "C.C. Rider".

Even through music, the Dems showed their progressiveness; the Republicans their penchant for traditional standbys.

But Wait! The Election is Just Getting Started…

WHEN I TURN IN TONIGHT AND SAY MY PRAYERS, along with asking for a break for Britney, I’ll beseech the heavens to make the outcome of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary a surprise. Not that I have a thing against the charismatic Democratic Illinois Senator Barack Obama or the Republican with the man-of-the-cloth manner, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. But I do resent the media’s penchant for reacting as though Iowa’s results are a fait accompli for the rest of the race, particularly for the Dems. Even the hard-to-impress Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has joined the Obama bandwagon, waxing romantically on Sunday about his caucus win: "The Obama revolution arrived not on little cat feet in the Iowa snow but like a balmy promise, an effortlessly leaping lion hungry for something different, propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again." Little cat feet? Balmy promise? A hungry leaping lion? Maureen, that’s downright mawkish for you.

Despite Dowd’s labeling Obama’s win a "revolution," if you read the same paper the previous day you would have been reminded that only one previous winner of the Iowa caucuses has ever gone on to win the presidency — George Bush in 2000. And the Times’ sister paper, the International Herald Tribune pointedly asks voters and the media for perspective. "Watching the campaign in cold, snowy and mostly empty Iowa, we were hoping…that this year’s Iowa-New Hampshire rush to judgment will be the last…Keeping this race alive so significant numbers of Americans in more populated states can participate would begin to make up for the ludicrous spectacle of the past year, which enriched the television networks and the political consultants (some $300 million already spent) far more than it enriched the political dialogue. We hope both parties will wake up and end the undemocratic system in which the choice of a new president rests far too heavily on nonbinding votes in January by voters who don’t necessarily represent the rest of the country." Crabby could not have said it better.

A year into this premature ejacu-lection, many voters still don’t know what’s inside the suit known as Mitt Romney; they yearn to see the robotic Hillary spill some crocodile tears, a la Oprah, as proof that she really is human; they want time to figure out if Huckabee is Bush-lite in a Barber Quintet’s outfit; they wait to see if the real McCain or the panderer will please stand up. On another note, I think it’s too bad for us all that Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich and Texas Republican Ron Paul weren’t allowed to debate on Fox Sunday night. Whoever said the revolution will not be televised was right. When it happens, we’ll all be watching reruns of The Simpsons..