We wrote a long post a week or two ago, dropping down into the mindset of Bill Clinton: an ex-President famed for speech-making, yet confronting a brash young competitor who seems to be out-speechifying him. We ended that post with the following longish paragraph of speculation:

“And when Clinton touches down in Boston or LA or Minneapolis or Kansas City this election cycle, and his own motorcade is snarled by traffic headed to an Obama rally that will more often than not double or triple the size of his own, he must think about that night, and it must make this election very personal to him, less about Hillary than about Bill, less about the President she or Obama or anyone else on earth might be, and more about the man Clinton himself never quite was.”

And the ex-President’s approach to campaigning this cycle continues to bear us out.

Attacking Obama’s speeches has become the Clinton campaign’s coordinated attack du jour. But just two days ago, in Nacogdoches, Texas, Clinton suddenly veered into the argument he really wanted to make: that he, not Obama, was the master orator.

“Clinton went on to tout — at length — his own speech-making abilities, as if to one-up the crowds of tens of thousands appearing at Obama’s rallies in recent weeks. ‘I’ve been told I give a pretty good speech,’ he said, grinning. He mentioned attendance of over a million at a speech in Africa, and over 100,000 when he spoke at the Brandenburg Gate after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

Not just undisciplined, although the segue is that. Not just illogical, given that the message of the day was that speeches don’t count, and clearly to the ex-President they very much do — they can be historic events in the history not just of a country but of a continent.

Not just undisciplined and illogical, but childish, finally.

That’s the word we’re looking for: the behavior of a man so used to getting his way, and so used to being lionized while he does so, that losing at his own game, played almost precisely his own way, is utterly unthinkable.

Which should make the Convention in Denver something like that last half-hour of a three-hour birthday party at Pizza Putt, when one of the six-year-olds, having lost at miniature golf, suddenly confronts the fact that someone not only ate the last slice of pepperoni but finished off the dregs of the root beer as well.