Should Hillary Wait Until March 4th To Get Out?

UPDATE: Hillary wins Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island.

Two different columnists say no. First, Jonathan Alter in Newsweek:

If Hillary Clinton wanted a graceful exit, she'd drop out now—before the March 4 Texas and Ohio primaries—and endorse Barack Obama. This would be terrible for people like me who have been dreaming of a brokered convention for decades. For selfish reasons, I want the story to stay compelling for as long as possible, which means I'm hoping for a battle into June for every last delegate and a bloody floor fight in late August in Denver. But to withdraw this week would be the best thing imaginable for Hillary's political career. She won't, of course, and for reasons that help explain why she's in so much trouble in the first place.

Withdrawing would be stupid if Hillary had a reasonable chance to win the nomination, but she doesn't. To win, she would have to do more than reverse the tide in Texas and Ohio, where polls show Obama already even or closing fast. She would have to hold off his surge, then establish her own powerful momentum within three or four days. Without a victory of 20 points or more in both states, the delegate math is forbidding. In Pennsylvania, which votes on April 22, the Clinton campaign did not even file full delegate slates. That's how sure they were of putting Obama away on Super Tuesday.

The much-ballyhooed race for superdelegates is now nearly irrelevant. Some will be needed in Denver to put Obama over the top, just as Walter Mondale had to round up a couple dozen in 1984. But these party leaders won't determine the result. At the Austin, Texas, debate last week, Hillary agreed that the process would "sort itself out" so that the will of the people would not be reversed by superdelegates. Obama has a commanding 159 lead in pledged delegates and a lead of 925,000 in the popular vote (excluding Michigan and Florida, where neither campaigned). Closing that gap would require Hillary to win all the remaining contests by crushing margins. Any takers on her chances of doing so in, say, Mississippi and North Carolina, where African-Americans play a big role?

And from Bob Novak:

Even before Sen. Barack Obama won his ninth straight contest against Sen. Hillary Clinton, in Wisconsin last Tuesday, wise old heads in the Democratic Party were asking this question: Who will tell her that it's over, that she cannot win the presidential nomination and that the sooner she leaves the race, the more it will improve the party's chances of defeating Sen. John McCain in November?

In an ideal though unattainable world, Clinton would have dropped out when it became clear even before Wisconsin that she could not be nominated. The nightmare scenario was that she would win in Wisconsin, claiming a "comeback" that would propel her to narrow victories in Texas and Ohio on March 4. That still would not have cut her a path to the nomination. But telling her then to end her candidacy and avoiding a bloody battle stretching to the party's national convention in Denver might not have been achievable.

The Democratic dilemma recalls the Republican problem, in a much different context, 34 years ago, when GOP graybeards asked: "Who will bell the cat?" -- or, go to Richard Nixon and inform him that he had lost his support in the party and must resign the presidency. Sen. Barry Goldwater successfully performed that mission in 1974, but there is no Goldwater facsimile in today's Democratic Party (except for Sen. Ted Kennedy, who could not do it because he has endorsed Obama).

Clinton's rationale for remaining a candidate is the Texas-Ohio parlay, and pre-Wisconsin polls gave her a comfortable lead in both states. But Texas has become a dead heat, and her margin in Ohio is down to single digits. Following the Wisconsin returns, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, Clinton's leading endorser in the state, is reported to have privately expressed concern as to whether he can hold the state for her. If she ekes out a win in Ohio while losing Texas, who will bell Hillary?

Jonah Goldberg at The Corner says that if superdelegates were going to be Hillary's savior, her campaign has done a poor job of making the case that such a win would be legitimate:

It seems to me that the biggest proof that the Clinton campaign is in a flop-sweating panic is that while they are desperately trying to scrounge-up super delegates, they aren't doing anything to make their use more palatable to the Democratic base or to the political press. Even if she could win over super-delegates in a nominal way, she can't use them unless the party and the press consider it legitimate to decide the nomination via super-delegates. Right now, surrogates should be spouting analogies that make her case. "A race isn't over if nobody crosses the finish line" or some such should have been repeated so often we should be sick of hearing it already.

The Clintons used to be masterful about staying on message like this. During the impeachment debates, Clinton's surrogates spoke with one voice about how "the president is not above the law, but he's not below the law either." No Clinton sock-puppet was allowed to exhale a breath without calling Ken Starr a dirty tobacco lawyer. But now there seems to be no such discipline or foresight in Clinton land.

The campaign is quickly closing in on the Clintons. Neither candidate can win at this point, but Obama will have the better argument for election given his lead in pledged delegates, popular vote and contests won (not to mention his 11 win streak that still goes on). Superdelegates will not be too excited about overturning that result and possibly splitting the party. Clinton's only hopes are big wins in Texas and Ohio, and polls in both states are tightening. If she wins one or both, they're likely to be close with the delegate counts almost identical. She won't gain much ground at all.

Just as everyone in the GOP is telling Mike Huckabee that it's time to get out, some key Dem needs to do the same for Hillary. She probably won't listen, but at least the party will try to save itself from a devastating split.

I'll talk about this subject and more on tonight's BlogTalkRadio program which you can hear by clicking on the icon. Feel free to call in and join the conversation. The show kicks off at 7pm PT.

I'll also be running my favorite Oscar broadcast political jokes and will talk a little bit about the NASCAR submarine races in Fontana this weekend (which as of this writing are still underway). The call-in number will be (347) 347-5547.