Countdown for Mrs. Clinton?

The celebrated baseball statistician Bill James crossed over recently to put together a formula that can tell you with certainty when a basketball lead is permanently safe in any given game.

• Take the number of points one team is ahead.
• Subtract three.
• Add a half-point if the team that is ahead has the ball, and subtract a half-point if the other team has the ball. (Numbers less than zero become zero.)
• Square that.
• If the result is greater than the number of seconds left in the game, the lead is safe.
• (For those who really care, that means you can safely leave the game if your team is ahead by 17 with a little more than 3:00 to go.)

Someone will soon share the political equivalent of this formula with Hillary Clinton. Before the end of April the Democrats will have their nominee. No battling it out through the end of the primaries. No brokered convention. No credentialing battle. Hillary will drop out of the race during this cruelest month.

Because the electoral version of James’ calculus starts with the fact that in handicapping any election season, an experienced analyst or activist has to take a serious look at both the micropolitics and the macropolitics. Peering into the micropolitics of the 2006 election, for instance, it was difficult to see how Republicans could lose 30 seats. Going district-by-district, many serious politicos — even knowing it was a bad year for Republicans — didn’t see more than a high-teens loss for the Grand Old Party.

Based on the macropolitics of 2006, however, it was clear — in the immortal words of Bush 41 — that Republicans were in deep doo-doo. Think disapproval numbers regarding Iraq, Foley, Katrina, spending, Abramoff, Cunningham … Our side could have lost many more. Some would argue we should have.

Applying that same approach to the current Democratic presidential race, the micropolitics (state polls, delegate counts, daily win/loss headlines, blogging battles, cable show combat, the upcoming Pennsylvania primary) and the conventional wisdom would tell you there is no end in sight for the battle between Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.).

But the macropolitics tell a much different story. The other powerful Democratic female politician in town is throwing sharp verbal elbows in Sen. Clinton’s direction. National polls show Obama pulling ahead, in some cases significantly. Failure to gain closure on re-votes in Michigan or Florida. Superdelegates moving to the junior senator from Illinois. Obama’s deflections about the Rev. Wright — while a major problem for him in the general election — satisfy Democratic primary crowd. All the macropolitics work against the former first lady.

Now, unlike the certainty of the Jamesian methodology, this analysis does not add up to a definitive declaration that Mrs. Clinton can’t win. I’ll leave that to the number-crunchers. But it is a cold, hard recognition of the truth that politics doesn’t move in a straight line. Hillary will abruptly exit the race. And soon.

What does this conclusion mean for the GOP team? Regardless of the outcome in the Democratic primary campaign, Republican activists are rooting for the political bloodletting, funds depletion and general hard feelings to continue to play out right up to Denver. And it’s not that I want the Democrats to miss out on all that fun. However, Republicans need to deal with reality and not base the next election on some faint hope the other party will hand them the White House. We need to gear up for the next stage.

As Nassim Taleb wrote in The Black Swan, “History does not crawl, it jumps.” Once Sen. Clinton confabs with her electoral sabermetrician rather than her political soothsayers, this race will change rapidly and radically. And many will be inexplicably caught off guard … again.