"All the way" takes on new meaning, with Clinton. It means unrelenting, total, scorched earth destruction and devastation of her opponent. It means that when Obama actually gets the backing of enough superdelegates to cross the threshold to win, it will still not be over. Hillary will be insisting that the Florida and Michigan votes must count. She will take this all the way to Denver, no matter what.
As I write this, Tim Russert is saying that if Obama wins South Carolina and Indiana, then "he could put this away." Russert is suggesting that that will have given the superdelegates an excuse, or cover to put OBama over the top. "Otherwise it will go until June."
Sorry Tim. It ain't happenin'. She is going all the way, no matter what. If you think Terry McCullough or Bill Clinton or Howard Wolfson are going to EVER advise Hillary to "give up," you are fooling yourself.
It is clear that Hillary and her hangers on will not give up until she is flat out rejected at the convention. She will work to destroy Obama's chances, even after he gets enough superdelegate votes to win. She will go into the Denver convention demanding that Michigan and Florida votes be counted. She will go to Denver showing how effective she has been at destroying Obama, arguing that he held back, was weak.
The NY Times offers an op-ed today, The Low Road to Victory which says,
The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.
Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.
If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead."
The question is, in destroying Obama, will she also destroy the Democratic party and its chances of taking back the whitehouse? I am hearing from more and more people who WILL go third party rather than vote for her. I know how hard it will be for ME to vote for her, let alone go out and campaign for her. When you're a member of a team, even if you're the quarterback, you don't kill the team's chances, don't injure the quarterback your competing with to be the one to start the game.
Just a moment ago Hillary tells Joe Scarborough, "It's going to be up to delegates. They have to make the independent decision." Sounds like August in Denver talk to me. This isn't even close to over.
Get used to it. This is going to persist for FOUR more months. We won't know until November whether clinton's experiment in Right Wing, Rovian Republican political strategy will work. But for many of us, the answer is already in. You don't become the enemy to beat the enemy.
BTW, it's easy to know who wins with this continuing on, ad nauseum-- the MSM, who get four more months of democratic conflict and bloodletting-- and the GOP, which gets four more months of slack, with minimal aggression targeted against McCain.
