Why Hillary needs to throw in the towel

Today’s the do-or-die day for Hillary Clinton and her struggling campaign. Or is it? This Super Tuesday part II (Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont) isn’t so much a pivotal date in determining the Democratic nominee as it is a manufactured media celebration organized by the Clinton campaign. It’s time for Hillary to swallow her pride and step out of the way. Here’s why:

1) There is a clear incentive for the media to play this thing out for as long as possible. Obviously, it’s people like you and me who are hooked to our TVs, have our home pages set to our favorite news website, and have taken up blogging for the first time who are driving this already drawn-out primary process even further. The major news networks must have made a calculation, based on statistics indicating increased viewership over the past few months, that keeping this race up-for-grabs means higher ratings and higher profits. Face it, we’re hooked because we want to know our nominee. But prolonging this process isn’t drawing any more contrasts between the two candidates, because there really aren’t that many. It’s time for the voters to step up and tell the media that they need to start focusing on the race that actually matters with the Republicans. But so long as Hillary makes this primary a personal battle rather than a political one, she runs the risk of wearing out the electorate and distracting the party from the real battle ahead.

2) The numbers don’t lie — Hillary overtaking Obama in the delegate count is going to require reinventing the rules of arithmetic. As each state’s primary goes by, either candidate picks up a sizable number of delegates, but what really counts is the NET gain relative to the other. Each state assigns delegates in proportion to the popular vote won by either candidate, so even if Clinton beats Obama in both Texas and Ohio, it’s the margin by which he beats him that matters, not the victory itself. Marc Ambinder of the The Atlantic has performed a state-by-state projection of the delegate count post-June, after every state has held a primary. Based on his estimates, which, though based on numbers he pulled out of his ass, still appear to be reasonable expectations, Obama will net more delegates than Clinton (and by the way, his predictions assume that Clinton wins the popular vote in TX and Ohio, which in my view is optimistic). This is troubling for Clinton. At this point she needs to be not only pulling even with Obama in the number of delegates she picks up, but also exceeding his net gain in order to close the already-existing lead he enjoys. As Ambinder puts it, her chances of taking over Obama in the delegate count look pretty bleak:

If, say, voting ends and the press discovers that Obama has a secret second family in Idaho and all his superdelegates abandon him; if, for some reason, she wins 75% of the popular vote in the states after Ohio and Texas and half the remaining superdelegates; if, by slow attrition, he closes the delegate gap to about 70 and picks off two thirds of the remaining superdelegates; if the pledged (Obama) delegates concur with the credentials committee and seat the (Clintonian) Florida and Michigan delegations) — then, yes, it’s possible [for Hillary to win the nomination].

In a similar piece, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek uses equally improbable projections heavily favoring Senator Clinton and concludes the following:

So no matter how you cut it, Obama will almost certainly end the primaries with a pledged-delegate lead, courtesy of all those landslides in February. Hillary would then have to convince the uncommitted superdelegates to reverse the will of the people. Even coming off a big Hillary winning streak, few if any superdelegates will be inclined to do so. For politicians to upend what the voters have decided might be a tad, well, suicidal.

The Clinton campaign is probably relying on the possibility that they may harness some momentum after today’s big primaries, but polls show that any victory on her part will be marginal at best, leaving her still trailing Obama in delegates. In any case, she isn’t giving up anytime soon.

3) The Clinton campaign is effectively fighting a proxy war for John McCain and the Republicans. The longer this campaign has gone on, the more negative it has become. From the plagiarism charges, to leaking pictures of Obama wearing African garb, to fear-mongering voters with myths of Obama’s inability to handle a crisis situation, the Clinton campaign has done some of the dirty work of Karl Rove free of charge. And that’s not conducive to a unified Democratic party that’s set on taking back the White House in November. You can just imagine either of the Clintons being featured in an attack ad against Obama. Moreover, the Clintons remain wildly popular among the party, and it’s hard to envision either of them stumping for Obama and speaking at the convention in Denver without sounding a bit hypocritical. They’ve pushed their limits on how far to go in attacking Obama, and it’s high time they recognize that their efforts are counterproductive to a general election victory.