PHILADELPHIA – Hillary Rodham Clinton is on her way to becoming the biggest loser of this election.
If he wins tomorrow, Barack Obama will certainly be his party’s standard-bearer in 2012 – icing Clinton out of the White House for at least eight years.
And she’ll be nearly 70 in 2016 – a young sprout compared to John McCain but probably too old to carry the flag for the newly recast party of youth and hope.
Until then, Clinton will be exiled to the Senate to serve out her second term, more like a sentence than a term for the former first lady, who will be a middle player in an increasingly fat Democratic majority.
Having lost a primary that had looked inevitably hers, Clinton will see that her power – once bound in the potential of her presidency – has vanished.
This Democratic majority in the Senate holds very little gratitude for the Clintons’ successes of the 1990s.
They remember being punished by voters and toiling in the minority while the Clintons lived it up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., with their Lincoln Bedroom Rewards Program and quiet pizza trysts just off the Oval Office.
Nor will Clinton enjoy any status as a go-to lawmaker on Capitol Hill for an Obama administration. He has many deeply loyal and indebted friends there who are all too happy to see the Clintons whacked from power.
Instead, Obama’s main Senate consigliere will be his top, earliest cheerleader, fellow Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin.
And every Senate seat Democrats pick up tomorrow in the expected Obama surge will add to the gratitude they feel for his wrenching the party from the Clintons’ cold, dead political hands.
Rarely does Hillary Clinton miss an opportunity to remind audiences of how close she came to the nomination, but her gusto is back as she tirelessly campaigns for her former foe in so many swing states where she delivered him debilitating late hits.
How very Clintonesque.
churt@nypost.com