"The pundits and the naysayers proclaimed week after week that this race was over."

Yeah, and the pundits were right. What they said was that Obama had established such a lead that there was essentially no way Clinton could win. And they were right. In spite of signficant wins in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania, Clinton couldn't catch Obama in the delegate count.

What she has done is spend a couple of months whipping up a sense of grievance among her supporters, dividing the party and diminishing its chances of victory in November. Jeffrey Toobin got it right on CNN. She is a deranged narcissist.

Make no mistake, there has been a snarky tenor of criticism about Clinton's determination to stay the course through all the primaries. Every other presidential dreamer in her position had taken the fight to the convention (Ronald Reagan in 1976, Ted Kennedy in 1980, Gary Hart in 1984), but she has been demonized for hanging on until the first Tuesday in June.

The party that took the nominating fight to its convention lost the Presidential election in every case. Great precedent there. And if not for the pressure from elsewhere in the party, Clinton certainly would have taken it all the way to the convention (we still don't know that she won't).

The real problem here is that Hillary Clinton feels entitled to the nomination and has been pushing the buttons of aggrieved women for the last two months in an attempt to garner support. In the process, she has divided the party and damaged its prospects for November. Rather than talk about what Obama needs to do to reach out to women, we should talk about Clinton's obligation to the Democratic party --- an obligation she has failed dismally to discharge over the last two months.

The pundits said two months ago that Obama's delegate lead would be almost impossible to overcome, that Clinton would need to get an unattainably high percentage of the vote in the remainder of the contests in order to catch him. They were proved right. Clinton did well in the remaining contests, but Obama's lead was insurmountable, just as the pundits said it would be.

Clinton stubbornly refused to accept the facts. She demonstrated a capacity for denial that resembles that of George Bush. Seeing the obstacles that she faced, she tried to tear down Obama, repeating Republican talking points about his assocations, suggesting he was unfit to be Commander in Chief and so on. She increasingly sought to cast herself as a victim and to nurture a feeling among her supporters that she had been robbed of the nomination. She and her team encouraged the idea that Obama couldn't win because her supporters wouldn't vote for him.

It is true that Clinton has suffered from sexism and true that she has received a lot of votes simply because she is a woman. Obama has not been to blame for the sexism that she has suffered and Clinton's loss has been primarily her own doing.

It is way past time for Clinton to stop promoting herself and start to think about the party. And it is way past time for Clinton's supporters to get over the idea that their preferred candidate has been horribly mistreated. Obama treated her a lot better than she treated him. She lost in large measure because her win-at-all-costs tactics turned so many people off. It is those tactics, which are still very much in evidence, that need to be condemned.

Some have chosen to defend Harriet Christian's deplorable remark that Obama is "an inadequate black male who would not have been running had it not been a white woman that was running for president".

Leave aside the implicit racism and recall a fact. This race didn't start out with Obama and Clinton. It started with a large field of mainly white males, including John Edwards, Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd and Bill Richardson, all well credentialled candidates. Obama and Clinton succeeded in driving all of the white male candidates from the field. That doesn't speak loudly for either sexism or racism as a dominant factor in this race.

Obama didn't run and certainly didn't win because his opposition was a woman. He won the nomination against a strong, mainly male field because he ran by far the best campaign.

ChristopherK got it right about the tone of some letters here on Salon:

And that's cause it's the Internet. As I've pointed out in many posts these days, the Internet's anonymity lets rude, offensive and grotesque people get away with saying things they'd never say in the company of actual people.

I frequent a web site dealing with photography. There are regular eruptions of flame wars. Just a couple of days ago, one person called two other people "thugs" over some disagreement over the relative merits of different camera types. As ChistopherK says, the fact that discussion over the Internet is often rude shouldn't be news to anyone familiar with it.

In policy terms, there is little to choose between Obama and Clinton. So what is the real issue that is causing such hostility toward Obama from some Clinton supporters? Simple. Obama has a penis whereas Clinton has a vagina. For that he can't be forgiven.

Let them throw 18 million temper tantrums: one for all of us.

Don't kid yourself that 18 million voters agree with you. When people refocus and see the choice between Obama and McCain, they will overwhelmingly support Obama.

The primary was a choice between Democrats. The general election is a choice between a Democrat and a Republican (regardless of what third party candidates are in the race --- no third party candidate will win). Having your favourite candidate in the primary lose to another candidate is a standard experience for millions of voters in every primary battle. Most people still end up supporting the nominee of their party. That will be the case this time too.