Hillary Clinton in West Virginia.
(AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
Should Clinton quit, and let Obama focus on McCain?
What happened
Hillary Clinton is vowing to fight on “until there is a nominee” as Barack Obama picked up several more superdelegate endorsements in the wake of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, and party insiders and media analysts said Clinton should end her campaign. Former senator George McGovern, the Democrats’ 1972 presidential nominee, announced that he was shifting his support from Clinton to Obama. “The mathematics are all with Senator Obama,” he said on CNN. (The Washington Post, free registration)
What the commentators said
“It is time for Clinton to do something she is not wired to do,” said The Seattle Times in an editorial. She should “acknowledge the electoral math”—Obama has amassed an all-but-insurmountable lead in delegates to the nominating convention—and “yield” to “the candidate with the best chance to win and unify Democrats” for the general election battle against Republican John McCain. Clinton is even out of money, and has now had to loan her campaign another $6 million, on top of an earlier $5 million loan, just to keep soldiering on. The fight is over.
Clinton “has every right to stay in the race,” said the San Francisco Chronicle in an editorial. Nowhere is it written that everyone in the party must rally around a single candidate “when the math becomes implausible.” Clinton’s only real chance, however, is “revelation or gaffe that might persuade the superdelegates that Obama is unelectable.” And she will truly be doing her party a disservice if she continues her “negative attacks”—including her “scoffing” at Obama’s fitness to be commander-in-chief, and her “absurd mocking of him as the elitist.”
It might even be good for Obama to have Clinton remain in the race until she trounces him in West Virginia and Kentucky, said Chadwick Matlin in Slate. He would lose even if she dropped out; at least now she’ll spare him “the embarrassment” of losing “to a ghost.” With her campaign hurting for money, though, it’s unclear how long she can keep this up. But “as long as she's hanging around, there's still a remote possibility that she can take Obama's place if the unpredictable happens.”
If this long battle has demonstrated anything, said Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal, it’s that the “conventional wisdom” can be very, very wrong. There is no denying that Obama is now the “presumptive favorite.” The long fight for the Democratic nomination has had pluses for the party—it has energized voters and donors—and minuses—it has weakened Obama, introduced the nation to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and created a “fissure” between the party’s blue- and white-collar voters. But there’s nothing Obama “can or should do about it” if Clinton keeps on fighting until the primaries end in June, or until the convention in August. “Hold on to your hat. It's going to be one heck of a ride through Nov. 4.”
