When at last they shoot a large tranquilizer dart into her behind and drag her off the national stage, the lasting memory I will have of Hillary Clinton is Hillary at the coffee machine.

Hillary at the coffee machine is better even than Hillary at the gas station and better than Hillary standing up in the back of somebody's pickup truck and better than Hillary throwing down a shot and a beer and better than Hillary eating pie. That pickup truck she was standing in, incidentally, was no workingman's pickup truck or, more accurately, was at one time but is now a restored classic. I only saw the pickup bed. It looked like a Chevrolet from the mid-1960s. That doesn't mean much except that Hillary's people, for the occasion of that photo opportunity, could not produce a real mud-splattered current model because people were out working and did not have the time to join one of the increasingly smaller knots of die-hards who come out to see her now.

They come out to see her in the waning, as though she is some kind of marvel, a carnival attraction who offers, in the absence of her dashed presidential hopes, her astonishing endurance. She begs the likes of me and other amateur psychiatrists to imagine what possibly is going on inside her head, what it must be like back at the Ramada every night in a room strewn with muted-colored pantsuits, file folders, coffee gone cold.

God. The endless road. What a horrible existence.

Before they come to get her, with either the

dart or a butterfly net, she might do something more entertaining than appear at another coffee machine, but for now, it's Hillary at the coffee machine that stands out. I imagine you can still see it on YouTube. That's where I first saw it, alerted to go there, to YouTube, by an e-mailer. Just type in "Hillary making coffee" or whatever. You'll find it.

It was — what difference does it make? — in Indiana, probably. She worked Indiana hard. It might even have been on the same day that she made the appearance at the gas station, arriving in the front seat of an extended cab Ford F-250 that the fellow driving, Jason Wilfing, 33, a sheet-metal worker chosen to represent Blue Collar America, had to borrow from his boss because his truck could not have accommodated Hillary and a staff person and a security agent. And behind her was the large carbon footprint of six Suburbans full of security people, two squad cars and a news van with the press pool and the photographers.

Hillary stood on the gas station apron with Wilfing. He pumped gas into the borrowed truck, and she, having just lent her campaign $9.5 million, pretended to understand how gas gets pumped and how expensive it is. She was, then, selling her gas tax holiday idea.

Yes, I bet it was that day, the same day. The press must have followed her into the gas station and she either really wanted a cup of coffee or thought that as long as she had all the cameras around, she might as well do something else to show how real she is, hanging out with sheet-metal workers and the like, so she went to the automated coffee machine, and then the fun began.

The posting on YouTube that I saw set the adventure to music, 1970s sitcom music. A stroke of genius, that. For the life of her, Hillary could not get the machine to behave, to deposit even the cup, much less the coffee. She looked at the machine from every angle, bending to look up at its confusing innards. She pulled levers and pushed buttons.

Tenaciously, she kept at it. She touched the machine. She gave it a little pat. She lost.

I liked her at that moment. She seemed so ultimately vulnerable.

When they come to get her with the dart or the net, I hope somebody takes care of her.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5474. Soucheray is heard from 2 to 5:30 p.m. weekdays on KSTP-AM 1500.