Paddy Power, an Irish bookie service with shops throughout the UK, paid off all of its bets on the US Democratic Party presidential nomination a month ago, after the Iowa primary but before New Hampshire, claiming that it was clear that Obama would win. They coughed up about £30,000 and said that it was clear things were finished, despite the show. After New Hampshire, they looked a little bit rash, but bookies aren’t in the habit of losing money or paying out when they don’t have to.

Sure enough, it’d take a serious implosion on the part of the Obama camp to screw this up now, and he’s been running a pretty flawless campaign, at least since last fall. Clinton at this point is like Huckabee, sticking around and fighting for show, but there doesn’t seem to be any real way for her to pull this off. He’s going to continue winning the rest of the February primaries and caucuses by 20+ points, maybe much more, and if she decides it’s worth the money to stick around through to March, she’s probably going to end up with an upset in Texas and a split-decision victory in Ohio that won’t actually bring her any closer to being the nominee… I suspect that after Tuesday, as Obama trounces her by forty points in DC and Maryland, and twenty in Virginia, she’s going to start watching the superdelegates who’ve yet to endorse line up with some crucial nods toward Obama, and after she’s clobbered in Wisconsin and Hawaii the following week, she’ll begin bleeding the support of the unpledged who had previously endorsed her. There’ll be intense pressure from within the party to step aside, and she’ll play it smart, accept a promise to be his first choice for a Supreme Court justice, and it’ll all be over. The general campaign will start, and it’ll just be a little bit of waiting for the inaugration of President Obama.

It’s not a bad future, if you’re an American who wants to see your country do something that no other Western democracy has done.

Normally I’d try and hedge my bet here, say that this is just one way it could go, and there’s a lot of time left on the clock and anything can happen, and Clinton’s been counted out before… but that’s not really the case. She is finished, and I will not miss her when she’s gone. I had been disappointed after the Paddy Power pick, a little bit, because so much of the talk about why she was doomed was rooted in the fact that she was, like, a crying PMS-y mess who was clearly unfit to lead because her vagina went inward instead of outward like a dick and so how could she really understand the quest for power… But now, not so much. As much as anything, Obama’s victories have been about him, as opposed to about rejecting her, and that is the way that this should be.

And so much for that. We’ll get a reprieve, finally, from news reports and well-meaning college students discussing whether they’d rather vote for Obama and end racism or Clinton and end sexism, and we’ll see what happens next. There’ll be talk of the VP nomination, but it won’t be Clinton… Probably a white dude, but anything’s possible. Janet Napolitano would be a hell of a choice, wouldn’t she? She’s currently the governor of Arizona, and would put the state in play, which could embarass McCain a bit. She’s endorsed Obama and would set up a potential female President whose last name isn’t Clinton to make a serious run within my lifetime. Hell, why not? She’s not listed on betfair.com yet in their books on the potential nominees, and John Edwards currently leads the boards over there, but it’s still early… They list Obama at 1-1.5 right now, incidentally, and Clinton’s down to 3.5-1, for the nomination. Trust the bookies.

So, yeah, we’ll get that reprieve from the heavy discussion of gender eventually, at least for a little while. But until we do, expect that it’s going to be rough talk, with everyone who didn’t vote for Clinton to be called a traitor or a misogynist or both, and the lamentations that America wasn’t able to give a fair shake to a woman overwhelming. It couldn’t possibly be that people just believe in Obama… And as a white dude, it’s tricky to talk about things like this at all. The white male perspective on both race and feminism often speaks from a position of ignorance, but I do find certain things revealing. The outcry among Clinton supporters that her campaign has been hobbled by sexism, while accusing anyone of bringing up race of playing the race card; the racism, both outright and subtle, among her supporters… The same people who were eager to spread the unfounded, easily disproved apocryphal tale of Obama walking out for his Iowa victory party to the strains of “99 Problems” are eager to insist that racism isn’t a factor, but sexism is. The only way to prove you’re not sexist is to vote for Hillary, but a vote against Obama has nothing to do with race, it’s just that he’s not qualified (and they would never make a big deal about the fact that he’s black, because they’re past all of that, but the Republicans probably will- they’ll probably even speculate that he was maybe a drug dealer once, but to mention that these things are racist is being unfair to Clinton)… The real problem here, to me, is the narrative that the Clinton supporters seem to have embraced that sexism is objectively worse than racism, and that, if one has to choose which one to vote against, the only conscionable choice is sexism. It seems a narrow view, as voting for either candidate will not end the problems of racism and misogyny, and it seems to me that the two aren’t mutually exclusive, anyway.

But that’s all white dude perspective on an issue on which I am not an authority. And, in the end, it’s largely irrelevant. It’s all over now but the concession speech.