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Read other letters about this article
When you win a nomination, you don't wait to declare victory.
And Walter Shapiro is not telling Clinton what she should be doing. Quite the opposite, in fact:
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.
But to be fair to Obama supporters and the media--and despite the complaints of Clinton supporters--very few people have been calling on Clinton to drop out.
What Obama supporters have criticized, and bitterly, is the tenor of Clinton's campaign, which is rather different from at least one of the predecessors cited. Gary Hart stayed in the race but stayed positive. Both Kennedy and Reagan were more bitter (though not as bitter as Clinton). And both Kennedy and Reagan (unlike Hart) are often seen as contributing to their party's loss the following November.
The anger directed at Clinton and her supporters concerns the kind of campaign she's run, not her insistence on continuing to campaign. That doesn't mean that the accusations labeled at the Clinton camp are fair. But one cannot defend her simply by saying that she shouldn't have been forced to drop out. That's not the issue.
There's another important difference from these earlier examples: when Carter in '80 and Mondale in '84 effectively clinched their nominations, long before the convention, the media said as much. Kennedy and Hart may not have been "demonized," but their candidacies weren't taken seriously once they had no real path to the nomination.
Sen. Clinton reached that point in late February. You can't blame her campaign (and her supporters) for ignoring this fact. You can, however, blame the media for continuing to act as if she had a prayer of actually getting the nomination once Obama had an effectively insurmountable delegate lead.
