Primary and Secondary Choices

Losing Campaign Staffers Can't Switch Loyalties at The Drop of a Hat

Enough about the candidates, what about the staffers?

The hardest, longest, closest primary in history is over, and the losers are supposed to get over it and become Obamaniacs?

Try to tally the sheer will, sacrifice and devotion by the numbers: 16 months of sleep deprivation, 480 nights not in your own bed, 50 states (plus a bunch of those confusing territories), 960,000 calories of road food, 4.8 million PDA thumb strokes, more than enough tears (joy, grief), many memorable meltdowns, 17 1/2 hangovers and a scattered handful of hours of perfect righteous euphoria -- for what?

When Hillary Clinton suspended her crusade Saturday with one soaring speech, some of her staffers looked unmoored in the National Building Museum's Great Hall, spent and melancholy. Behind their practiced smiles, they were grieving a future that had once appeared so alive and real. California won, and Texas, too, and Ohio and Pennsylvania and . . . what if? If only . . .

"Please don't go there," Clinton said, reading their thoughts.

For what? Well, for 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, Clinton reminded them. But that's not a win.

Losing a primary is like little else in human striving. Death, at least, offers finality. A general election loss affords the cheap solace of permanent contempt for the victor from the other party. Reach back to still-raw agonies of defeat from youth: Even after the last heartbreaking loss in the soccer tournament, all you had to do was shake hands on the field, then resume cursing tearfully. You didn't have to smile, change uniforms and play for the other team.

After a primary, if you want to put your party in the White House, you are expected to suck it up and start making cold calls for the guy who knocked your gang out of the ring. And here's your boss, with her last working order coming at you in the form of a chipper exhortation on the Clinton campaign Web site:

"Thank you! Support Senator Obama today. Sign up now and together we can write the next chapter in America's story."

Getting over it takes more will, character and time. A faith in the bigger Democratic picture.

"You get over it because you have to get over it," says Paul Begala, the consultant who worked for Bill Clinton and who says he was "one thousand percent for Hillary."

Begala says the only thing in the human condition akin to a tough primary is a family fight. He quotes an uncle who used to say, "God gave us families so we wouldn't fight with strangers."