What next for Hillary Clinton? Her failure to gain enough elected delegates to win her party’s nomination is a far cry from the “inevitable” candidate she seemed back in January.

She now finds herself in the embarrassing position of a young tomboy who has climbed high in a tree to show she is as bold and brave as the real boys, only to have to summon the fire brigade to help her clamber down.

She will finish the race, however, with her dignity largely intact. Her fighting spirit and cheerful determination in the contests since Super Tuesday have even induced grudging praise from her opponents. She is a better candidate and a better politician now.

Nor has she been roundly defeated. She can argue, with justification, that her party split itself down the middle and that the Democrats’ antiquated electoral system has caused them to pick the candidate least likely to win in November.

However, her claim that she has the most votes, even if true, leaves her with little more than a moral advantage. All democracy is in practice representative democracy, not a mere numbers game. The Democratic leadership, which includes her, approved a system that did everything to ensure that bare numbers were not of supreme importance, in line with their philosophy of giving minorities a helping hand.

Anyone who has waded through the Democratic Party primary electoral rule book, which is not exactly a beach read, discovers that Democrats are less interested in democracy than in enacting positive discrimination favoring racial minorities and, ironically for Mrs. Clinton, protecting women from sexism.

The influence of African-Americans is further boosted by the allocation of more delegates to districts that voted Democratic in the previous general election. Mrs. Clinton’s white blue-collar rural voters were penalized for being in a minority in their Republican voting districts, while African-Americans in inner-city areas that always vote Democratic were boosted.

All this is topped by a system of proportional representation in the allocation of elected delegates that ensures that no one ever overwhelmingly wins or loses a state. As Alice in Wonderland discovered from the Dodo, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”

Mrs. Clinton can attribute her failure to win enough elected delegates squarely on her party’s desire to ameliorate society’s ills through the imperfect formula of its voting system. As she cruelly has discovered, sometimes the best of intentions unintentionally provide absurd and often unjust consequences.

Not that she is alone in finding herself coming in second after winning more votes. In 1951, Britain’s Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee won a plurality of the votes in the general election, but, such are the vagaries of parliamentary democracy, Winston Churchill won the premiership. Ever the true democrat, Attlee merely shrugged. Tant pis. It’s a funny old world.

In the 1960 presidential election, Richard Nixon was confronted with evidence of massive voting fraud in Texas (courtesy John F. Kennedy’s running mate Lyndon Johnson) and in Chicago (bought by Kennedy’s father, Joe) that accounted for Kennedy’s slim plurality.

After a few minutes reflection, Nixon rejected a plea from an indignant Illinois congressman, Everett Dirkson, to demand a recount. Nixon understood politics rather better than those hotheads urging Mrs. Clinton to press on to Denver. As he recorded in his “Memoirs,” if the recount were to find that Kennedy had won all along, “charges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.”

Mrs. Clinton must now behave with magnanimity and grace if she is to keep the powder dry for a future run at the presidency. She would be unwise to accept the vice presidential nomination, in the unlikely event that Mr. Obama offers it to her.

November will be a testing time for America. We may discover that we have entered the post-racial phase of our history at last. If not, and the polling among registered Democrats is not encouraging, Mr. Obama will join the pantheon of decent men who were ill suited to win the presidency.

The evidence is clear that Mrs. Clinton stands a better chance of beating John McCain this November than Mr. Obama. This may explain why Mr. Obama has received such enthusiastic support from many prominent conservatives.

More of Mrs. Clinton’s coalition of white blue-collar men, women, older voters, and Hispanics say they will desert to Mr. McCain if Mr. Obama is the candidate than the Obama tribe of students, African-Americans, and the affluent well educated who say they will switch to Mr. McCain if she is the candidate.

Perhaps most important considering recent experience, according to all the polls collated by Real Clear Politics, only she can beat Mr. McCain in the key state of Florida, which delivers 27 electoral votes.

Mrs. Clinton therefore would be best advised to bide her time. She should conspicuously campaign for Mr. Obama this fall, as should Bill Clinton. The race in November will be close, notwithstanding the general distrust of Republicans, widespread dislike of President Bush, and the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. If Mr. McCain wins, Mrs. Clinton will have no need to say, “I told you so.”

If Mr. Obama wins, she should help him pass health care reform and bolster him in the Senate. His clear weakness is on national security and foreign affairs, a disability that may soon make itself evident as he fulfills his promise to meet our enemies face to face within his first year.

In the event of President Obama stumbling, Mrs. Clinton can expect the call to come to the aid of her party.

nwapshott@nysun.com