It may go down like this at the next Clinton-Sanders debate.  Mrs. Clinton looks at Senator Sanders, gets very serious, and speaks with that raunchy voice: "I knew Duke Snyder.  He was a friend of mine.  And you, Senator Sanders, are no Duke Snyder."

Of course, Duke Snyder was the Brooklyn Dodgers' centerfield, the Duke in the "Mickey, Willie & the Duke" song from the 1980s.

Mrs. Clinton faces a critical situation in New York.  She has the superdelegates, but Senator Sanders has the volunteers and the energy.  Mrs Clinton is also trying to prove that she's a native New Yorker, not the lady who moved there in 2000 because she couldn't win a Senate seat in Arkansas.

Mrs. Clinton's problems were detailed in a recent New York Post editorial:

Is the pressure of having lost seven out of eight primaries and caucuses to Bernie Sanders getting to Hillary Clinton? She’s sure saying some very strange things these days.

Now, Clinton has long been at high risk of getting into trouble whenever she veers from her carefully prepared scripts. But her loose-cannon problem has only grown as Sanders keeps winning.

Take her latest interview, with Politico’s Glenn Thrush, in which Clinton confesses to being “constantly amazed” by — airplanes:

“I mean, how it works, how the whole, you know, science of it . . . [how it] constantly manages to keep us afloat,” she said.

An effort to channel the lost innocence of her girlhood, maybe? But planes aren’t exactly new — unlike, say, the supermarket scanner technology that famously amazed the first President George Bush.

Clinton also pretends to have just discovered that Sanders has spent his life in politics as a proud socialist, saying breathlessly: “He’s a relatively new Democrat. I’m not even sure he is one.”

Just days before, she exploded after a presumed Bernie supporter challenged her on donations from (gasp) the fossil-fuels industry: “I am so sick — I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me,” she barked. “I’m sick of it.”

All this follows a host of recent boners, like her claim that the United States “didn’t lose a single person” in Libya — which ignored the two employees of her own State Deparment and two other Americans slain in Benghazi.

Or her vow to “put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.” Or her tribute to the late Nancy Reagan’s work on AIDS, which outraged AIDS activists.

Between her bizarre off-script pronouncements and the utter banality of her preprogrammed talks, it’s no wonder Democratic voters are so desperate for something new.

Hillary Clinton's chief problem is a lack of authenticity.  She tries and tries to connect, but there is no connection.  

I will never understand why she decided to pander to such a degree and commit herself to positions that will hurt her in the general election.  

What if she had looked at the young protesters and told them that there is no such thing as something free?  Or to stand up to the Black Lives Matter group, and told them to get consistent and talk about black-on-black crime?  Or that raising taxes on the rich is counterproductive and actually kills jobs?

She should have borrowed a page from Margaret Thatcher, who stood up and told people what they needed rather than wanted to hear.  Instead, she pandered and pandered.  The net result is that she is fighting for her political life against a socialist with a message not heard since Woodstock.

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