How many ways are there for me to say how sick to death I am of this, this sordid excuse for a campaign? Campaign, hell. It's as if there's a permanent national election, and I've been complaining about it for so long that I've forgotten when it started or when I started complaining about it.

Complaining in blog posts is a cheap form of therapy but still, I try to accept reality. While my biggest fear from day one has been that those awful Clintons might some day be returned to the White House, I have clung for dear life to my denial, and I still hope that they won't. But like a pair of twin Jasons from the movie Halloween, they just keep popping up and popping up. There is no stopping the Clintons and their driven, zombie-like relentlessness.

This is not to say that I support Barack Obama. There's one thing after another that's wrong with him, with more every day, and more to come after that. (The latest -- that his military advisor General McPeak is anti-Israel -- is something I find very disturbing.)

I understand the concerns over Obama, but few people who have themselves worked up into a lather are taking the time to think about how and why the Obama phenomenon came to happen.

In a word, timing.

By starting her campaign way, waaay too early, Hillary Clinton caused people to be way sicker of her than they would have been had she started the campaign at the normal time. She did this because she thought America would need time to get used to the idea (or get over the shock, depending on your point of view) of having a woman as president. But as issues and ideas go, having a woman in the White House is not quite as much of a thing to get used to as the reality of this particular woman, who is not just a woman, but the Clintons. Many Americans -- and in particular, many American politicians and political people on both sides -- were fatigued after eight years of the Clintons, and would just as soon have forgotten about them completely the way one forgets a bad dream.

What Hillary failed to anticipate was that by starting her campaign far too early, she would reactivate the dormant Clinton fatigue might have seemed to have been laid in its natural political grave. A grave which, it's worth remembering, the 22nd Amendment is supposed to ensure. But the 22nd Amendment failed in the case of the Clintons when Hillary's campaign resurrected them as a political force.

Getting used to the Clintons again is not the same thing as getting used to the concept of a woman president. The Clinton resurrection made the fact of Hillary's sex only a secondary feature. It was the resurrection of the Clintons that became the primary feature.

And here's where Hillary's math was wrong: the Clinton resurrection wasn't something to get used to, as it was the resurrection of Clinton fatigue -- something people were sick of.

Not only that, but it was a premature resurrection. She should have waited, but she didn't. Instead, she gave the fatigue plenty of time to trickle down and reach into every home like a thick and overpowering fog -- until at last every American family was thinking not "Hey, a woman in the White House!" but "Oh, the Clintons again," and "Oh the Clintons again." Over and over.

There's a fine line between "getting used to" and "getting sick of," but the Clinton campaign missed it completely.

And there was Obama -- a new, refreshingly fresh face offering a way out of all that prematurely resurrected but still smoldering Clinton fatigue.

OK, that's my fix on this, and I know I'm repeating myself. What set me off this morning was to read more about Hillary's latest explanation of the lie that she had come under sniper fire in Bosnia (the story won't die gracefully because, as might be expected, military leaders and Secret Service officials have been put on the defensive):

Clinton began retracting the remarks in a series of private interviews Monday and Tuesday before addressing about two dozen reporters here after a speech.

She told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "I was sleep-deprived, and I misspoke."

She told KDKA radio in Pittsburgh: "You know, I have written about this and described it in many different settings, and I did misspeak the other day. This has been a very long campaign."

And who's fault is that?

(I'm thinking that conservatives who fear an Obama presidency might want to ask the same question, but that's another topic....)

UPDATE: Commenter Van Helsing points out that Jason was in Friday 13, and not Halloween. My mistake.

There's also some discussion of when the Hillary campaign began. I don't honestly know how that would be measured. Officially, she announced in January of 2007, but she was raising money through the "Friends of Hillary" for some time before that, and there were financial irregulaties reported at least as early as March of 06.

Official or unofficial, her campaign has been going on for years, and many say it dates back to her first Senate run.