can she just go away?

and tell her to take Osamobama, McCainton, and the other corporate owned, big-fascist-government phonies with her.

real leadership-- where the people still matter. Is there such a thing?

There seems to be a hardcore of Clinton supporters who wrongly believe that she has a realistic chance of winning her party's nomination. This is rather astonishing, since she would need to win every remaining primary by large margins and then convince most superdelegates to vote for her. The odds of that happening are zero. If anything, obama will win most of the remaining primaries, possibly all of them. With the exception of the publicity and job sicking Hackebee, any rational candidate would have already withrawn from the race if he/she were in Clinton's position. Ihate to consider giuliani and Romney as rational, but they had been in hillaty's position and made the proper call. There's no reason for Hillary to still be in a race she will certainly lose. Presidential primaries are not an ego gratifying experience or an NFL game that must go on till the last second untill the ref blows the whistle, they are meant to pick the party's nominee for the presidency, period.

I was glad to see Hillary get elected in 2000 but since then I've become disgusted with her. Of course she stuck out as the best candidate the Democrats could muster--the spineless cowardice of the federal Dems has lowered the bar so far that you risk tripping over it. She's spent seven years planning to get the nomination by being a dwarf among midgets, and expecting to win on the not-being-George-Bush issue alone.

Her inability/unwillingness to seriously organize at the grassroots level, and her preference to do just enough to win just enough to win (that repetition is not a typo) has finally tripped her up. (It's not just her, of course. John Kerry basically played dead throughout the primary season, came to life just long enough to get the nomination, and then went back to sleep for the rest of the campaign.)

Frankly, it's poetic justice. If she was really serious about democracy, why hasn't she done anything in her seven years in the Senate to fix this godawful, theft-prone voting-machine system? From both a principled and a pragmatic standpoint, that should have been Job One for the Democrats, starting on January 21, 2000. But why bother fixing the system when you know the current president is so bad that the next election will be barely not close enough to steal?

Obama will win because he's neither lazy nor a coward, which puts him head and shoulders above all the other Democratic contenders.

I somehow managed to miss your letter, and so I am glad others here mentioned it. Your letter definitely should get red-starred. I appreciated the details of your campaign efforts and perspective. I did not realize ships were sailing to Lebanon in anticipation of a strike on Iran; I am going to go read about that now.

One part of your letter that immediately caught my attention was this:

"I spent my lunch break today making calls--I got through to an octogenarian who called me a traitor to my gender (I kept quiet and listened) and then I got through to someone who wanted to vote for Clinton because she felt that she MUST vote for a woman. Any woman. I think I managed to persuade her to at least consider Sen. Obama."

Congratulations on keeping quiet and listening to the 80-something who said you were betraying women by working for Obama. I don't think I could have held back from arguing.

Nice job on the pot roast and kitty litter. Sorry your house's value has dropped. Please come back to Salon and post more often. If people here have too much vitriol and artificial-intelligence, perhaps more people like yourself are the remedy (though I'm glad you're working on the campaign instead of wasting time in here like I am -- for my part, I have given money to the Obama campaign, which is nowhere near as valuable as your contribution).

brightstar65: "can she just go away? . and tell her to take Osamobama, McCainton, and the other corporate owned, big-fascist-government phonies with her. real leadership-- where the people still matter. Is there such a thing?"

So who would you vote for? John Edwards? Ron "I don't believe in evolution" Paul?

No, sir. The decision to give up the race is hers alone to make. You may rail at it all you want -- it is not up to you, and this is still a Democracy. And I would venture to guess that the great majority of her supporters want her to go all the way. Because this is what we believe in, this is what she has always been about. Never give up, even against the greatest of odds. You should wish that Obama were made of the same stuff.

I guess we all hear these debates differently, but my impression has been that her recent has been pretty much centered around 'anger,' & not this noble, steadfast march to the top. That anger appears to stem from a sense of thwarted entitlement.

This article and all the others that go on and on analyzying Hillary's downfall with an emphasis on empathy. As anther commetator mentioned, were the roles reversed, no one would be eulogizing Obama and questioning whether he should continue in the race. It would be a blunt "it's over, get out." Funny that Salon should practice this double standard.

Thanks for the soothsyaing.

Maybe get Camille on it, or rehire David Horowitz and have him run The War Room.

Salon==jerkasses

when he/she has no realistic chance of winning the nomination, not before. But once it's clear that the candidate cannot win, it's time to get out. Hillary is so scared of the tremendous void her withrawal would create in her life, that she would rather put it off untill the end of the primaries, because she just can't face the reality that she will never be the president. It doesn't mean that the Democratic party should indulge her, we have a presidential campaign to win.