Take a look at the video clip of the interview where Hillary Clinton says that it’s premature to ask her to leave the race because, after all, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June. Give her the benefit of the doubt. Accept that she was not trying to suggest that Barack Obama might meet a similar fate. Still, isn’t her pronouncement further evidence that Hillary has a tin ear? (“Tone deaf” is Bob Herbert’s expression, in his op-ed column today.)

When the nomination was still being seriously contested, I worried on this blog over whether, if she got the nod, Hillary Clinton could win in the fall. For years, based on the Gail Sheehy biography, I had thought Hillary might display a deafness for social nuance and a stiffness in interpersonal interaction. Democrats with these traits can make it to the level of senator or governor, but the electorate punishes them in national contests.

In a later post — when she continued to attack Barack Obama even after she had lost any chance of achieving the nomination by ordinary means — I called Hillary “unspeakable,” and a reader accused me of misogyny. I went too far, but I was expressing frustration over much the same issue, Hillary’s inattention to the effects of her speech and behavior. She seemed genuinely not to know that she had become a spoiler. And here, a second unpleasant element was added, a blind self-centeredness which, I will agree, is common in politicians.

What’s frustrating about the RFK reference is that it makes no sense. If Obama disappeared from the race for any reason — death, injury, scandal — Hillary would be the nominee. And she’d be a stronger one if, before the nomination devolved to her, for the sake of the party she had dropped out, reconciled with Obama voters, and shown the strength of her commitment to the general good.

There’s an additional unpleasantness in the 90-second “we all remember Bobby Kennedy” clip. Hillary is misleading. She reminds the interviewer that in the 1992 primary, her husband Bill was still running in mid-June; but the New York Times reports that Bill had wrapped up the nomination on April 7.

Hillary also says that it’s “unprecedented in history” for party members to call for an end to a campaign that could succeed only through a lightning strike. But the Times notes that “the Clinton campaign in 1992 used some of the same tactics that Mrs. Clinton and her supporters now decry, like declaring the nomination secure early and encouraging party leaders and the news media to climb on board.” As the Times pointed out in its initial coverage, Clinton had made the same misleading comment, and used same RFK reference, in March, in an interview with Time. It’s like the bullets-on-the-tarmac lie. There’s nothing spontaneous here. Hillary goes on until she’s caught.