Hillary: Does she still have a chance?

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is over, said Dick Morris in TheHill.com, and Hillary Clinton has lost. New York’s junior senator is understandably buoyed by her big primary victories last week in Ohio and Texas. She’s insisting that she’s back in the fight, and that it’s still too early for her party to anoint Barack Obama. But she’s wrong. After Obama won two more primaries—in Wyoming and Mississippi—this week, he’s leading her by more than 100 delegates, and there’s simply no way Hillary can catch up in the remaining nine primaries and caucuses. Even if she were to win every one of these contests by 10 points, she would gain just 60 delegates. Barring some unforeseen disaster, it’s far more likely that Obama will go to the Democratic convention with a lead of between 100 and 200 elected delegates—about the same margin he has now. Even Team Clinton, outwardly optimistic, is deeply worried, said Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker. “Inside the campaign, people are not idiots,” said a Clinton advisor. “Everyone can do the math.”

Hillary won’t let mere numbers stop her, said Rich Lowry in National Review Online. With her “shameless will to power,” she is determined “to pry the nomination from Obama’s hands one finger at a time.” Her plan now is to try to get delegates she won in Florida and Michigan seated at the convention, even though the Democratic Party long ago established that those states’ primaries—moved up to January, in violation of party rules—were null and void. She’ll also press on with her argument that Obama isn’t qualified to be president, and try to convince the 800 uncommitted “superdelegates’’ to ignore the will of Democratic voters.

In wooing the superdelegates, said John Dickerson in Slate.com, Clinton can make a reasonable case. As she points out, Obama didn’t take many of the big states—Ohio, Texas, New York, New Jersey, and California—that Democrats need to win to beat Republican John McCain. Further, said Jonathan Last in The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Obama’s support comes in large part from reliably Republican states such as Idaho, Utah, Georgia, and South Carolina. Democrats have no chance in those states come November.” Finally, Obama’s coalition is drawn mainly from the Democrats’ reliable base. By contrast, Clinton’s supporters—older voters, women, blue-collar whites, Hispanics, and Catholics—“would be McCain swing voters in a race against Obama.” Clinton still has a real shot at the nomination, and she owes it to the party and her supporters to press on.

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That’s nonsense, said Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times. National polls have consistently shown Obama, beating McCain easily, while Hillary runs even with or loses to him. Nonetheless, Hillary and her supporters have convinced themselves that she’s the best-qualified candidate, and are indignant that Obama is taking “what is rightfully theirs.” For this terrible injustice, they blame the media, the caucus system, and sexism. But “the real reason Clinton will lose is more prosaic: Obama is a far better politician.” Hillary is still too divisive, and too uninspiring, to carry a national election. “She’s a good enough politician to get elected in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, but not good enough to get elected president.” Under other circumstances, with her experience, fund-raising, and name recognition, she might have fared better. “Alas, she had the bad fortune to go up against Obama,” who has oratorical and political skills seen once in a generation. If Hillary really wants a Democrat in the White House in 2009, she’ll do the right thing—and gracefully depart a contest she cannot win.