Hillary Clinton Should Withdraw -- But She Won't

With crushing victories in the Wisconsin primary and Hawaii caucus last night, by 17 and 52 points, respectively, Barack Obama extended his winning streak to ten consecutive contests since February 5, and all but wrapped up the Democratic nomination for president.

Obama's dominance in Wisconsin is particularly telling. On paper, Wisconsin is anHillary Clinton's path to victory ideal state for Hillary Clinton, with its large white-working class population, long tradition of organized labor, and few African-Americans. But exit polls from America's Dairyland show just how much Hillary Clinton's core support has hemorrhaged. Obama tied Clinton among women and won men 67-31. He won every age group except for 65 years old and up; he won every income group; he won the religious and the secular; he won college-educated voters and non-college educated voters; he won every region of the state; he won union and non-union households; he won on every issue except experience; he won the married and the unmarried; he won Democrats, Republicans, and independents; he won liberals, moderates, and conservatives; he won whites and blacks. In short, he won everyone and everything.

For Hillary Clinton to win more elected delegates than Barack Obama at this point, she would have to carry every remaining state by margins approaching three-to-one --- a bare metaphysical possibility but little more than that. Her only practically conceivable path to the nomination (and still a long shot), would be to arrest Obama's momentum through relentless negative campaigning, narrow the pledged delegate margin with victories in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania, somehow seize control of the DNC's credentials committee to seat delegates allocated in the sham straw polls of Michigan and Florida, and strongarm just enough superdelegates into supporting her.

In other words, in the likeliest of the highly unlikely scenarios in which Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, she does so by rending the Democratic party apart, ensuring the mass desertion of many of its core constituencies in the fall, and handing the presidency to John McCain. She can only reach the general election by destroying any chance she might have had of winning it.

As proud as they are and as much as they wanted to win this thing, Hillary Clinton and her advisors must recognize that they have a critical choice to make, and little time to make it. On the one hand, she could make a dignified withdrawal from the race that will preserve her stature in the Democratic party and keep alive whatever hope she has of ever becoming president (she'll be younger in eight years than McCain is now). Alternatively, she could opt for a juvenile, apoplectic fit of rage and amour-propre, amplified a thousand fold by the glare of the television cameras --- the most desperate and destructive tantrum in American political history, preserved for posterity on reels of celluloid.

So which will it be, Senator Clinton? The early indications are, she's going to go with the tantrum.

The introduction to her latest non-concession speech (Clinton last conceded a defeat after the Iowa caucuses) was given by Tom Buffenbarger, the president of an Ohio union, who made the case for his candidate this way:

So now we have a decision to make. Will we rely on the Harvard Law Review editor? The silver-tongued orator from Kansas, Hawaii and Illinois? The man in love with the microphone?...

Barack Obama is no Muhammad Ali. He took a walk every time there was a tough vote in the Illinois State Senate. He took a walk more than a 130 times. That's what a shadow boxer does. All the right moves. All the right combinations. All the right footwork. But he never steps into the ring...

Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter.

The Clinton campaign calls this sort of classy rhetoric "drawing contrasts."

Since the sun came up, the Clinton campaign launched a website devoted to arguing that superdelegates ("automatic delegates" in Clinton Newspeak) are just the same as elected, pledged delegates, and that fundamental fairness dictates retroactively changing the Democratic party's nominating rules to seat delegates based on the results of the Florida and Michigan sham straw-polls.

Faced with a bleak financial picture of little to no cash on hand, little chance of expanding its donor base, and the majority of its big money donors maxed out, the Clinton campaign has made an end-run around campaign finance law, by opening a 527-operation under the innocuous name "the American Leadership Project." Since the group will be technically unaffiliated with the campaign, the Clintons' financier friends will be liberated to hand over cash in great big six-figure chunks. Better still, given the nature of 527s, the exclusive function of that money will be to fund scurrilous, swiftboat style attack ads.

The iceberg's in the hull, the money has fallen overboard, the superdelegates have swum to shore, and the rats are fleeing the deck. It's up to Hillary Clinton to decide whether she's truly determined to rip apart the life-preservers and drag her party to the bottom of the ocean.