Imagine that you have spent 18 months, 7 days a week, 17 hours a day, running for a party nomination for president, that you got 18 million primary votes, and that you still lost. A longer race than anyone has ever run; that began with so much promise and so much hope and ended, oddly, with a victory in South Dakota rather than a series of losses. She will recover from this; but people who think she is going to run for president again if Obama loses this year might want to think twice. There’s a reason Al Gore didn’t run again in 2004. The emotional consequences of this kind of disappointment, on this kind of epic scale, are unknown to the rest of us.