HILLARY CLINTON READY TO END BID FOR THE PRESIDENCY

I was never thrilled about all that baggage and trash around her-- the Terry McAuliffes, Mark Penns, Howard Wolfsons, Sandy Bergers, Richard Holbrookes-- but I've always harbored an affection for her and before the primary season really got under way I thought it was 50/50 between Obama and her in terms of who would make a better president. Even as her campaign turned more and more Rovian by the day, I always harbored a great deal of good will for Hillary herself and wouldn't have minded all that much if she wound up beating McCain instead of Obama. I suspect that Hillary Clinton would have made a decent president and even if Obama is 100 times as inspiring and 100 times as charismatic, the idea of shattering the ultimate glass ceiling for more than half the citizens of this country, is pretty inspiring in and of itself. But that baggage and trash...

Anyway, last night one of the CNN talking heads-- it was on in another room so I was just listening while blogging-- started talking about how two of her confidantes had said that she wants to be Obama's running mate. I think Obama should get to pick his own running mate and I wonder, as some wag on CNN did, if the "dream ticket" wouldn't turn into a nightmare ticket. That'll be his call though. If he wants my advise, he'll go with benign Clintonista Wes Clark, at once reaching out to the "other side" and also shoring up his national security and military cred.

Over at HuffPo today, very well-connected Lawrence O'Donnell claims she's dropping out "by June 15." He claims a "senior campaign official and Clinton confidante" told him there would be a nominee by June 15 and that Hillary is a reasonable person. I guess we can assume that that last assurance means she doesn't plan to rip Obama's throat out. "Everything about our conversation implied," writes O'Connell, "that he had already had this reality-based discussion with Hillary."

Today Amy Sullivan in Time makes the case that Hillary no longer has a case to make. I guess that was the genesis of the tear in Bill Clinton's eye last night. It's pretty much over-- nearly as much as Vito Fossella's political career.

No matter how hard she and her steadfast backers try, the exit polling from Indiana and New Carolina are not going to help make the case for her going on. In order for Clinton to persuade superdelegates to back her over Obama, she needed to demonstrate that she was the less divisive candidate who could win over general election swing voters in states like Indiana. Her aggressive campaign, however, has led to a growing gap-- now between 15 and 20 points in Indiana and North Carolina-- in the perception that she has been more unfair in her attacks than Obama has.

Clinton's recent embrace of a "gas-tax holiday"-- an idea dismissed by others in her party as a bit of ineffective pandering-- also reinforced questions about her trustworthiness. In Indiana exit polls, a full quarter of Clinton's own supporters said that they did not think she was honest. Just as Obama suffered in Ohio for looking like he was too political on NAFTA, Clinton's position on the gas tax issue riled Indiana voters, who consistently raised it in conversations with reporters the weekend before the primary vote.

Perhaps the most disturbing indicator for Clinton was the fact that 15% of those who voted for her on Tuesday said they would not back her in November (7% of Obama voters said they would not support him in the general election). Some conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh have urged Republicans in the remaining primary states to prolong the process by casting votes for Clinton, who they think would be an easier opponent for John McCain. Numbers like this, which some pundits claimed meant that Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" helped put Clinton over the top in Indiana, are watched closely by superdelegates and do not ease their concerns about Clinton's electability.

In today's New Republic John Judis writes that the primary is over. She "might still run in West Virginia and Kentucky, which she'll win handily, but by failing to win Indiana decisively and by losing North Carolina decisively, she lost the argument for her own candidacy. She can't surpass Barack Obama's delegate or popular vote count. The question is no longer who will be the Democratic nominee, but whether Obama can defeat Republican John McCain in November. And the answer to that is still unclear. Obama is going to need Hillary now to undo some of the harm her campaign has done to Obama-- to make sure that at least Democrats know he didn't ever take any oaths on the Koran and that he isn't anti-American or Muslim or just a puppet of Jeremiah Wright.

It was more newsworthy that early Clinton supporter George McGovern had endorsed Obama today and urged Hillary to pull out of the race but when I read that the most clueless and lamest Democrat in Congress, Heath Shuler, who apparently had had one too many smashes in the head in his day, had endorsed her, I knew the campaign was wrapping up. The latest Gallup polling shows Obama beating McCain in the general population-- and wait til he's the nominee!-- but also beating him overwhelmingly among Jewish voters. Hopefully we won't have to wait too much longer for Hillary to do the right thing and start working with Obama to bring the party together and defeat one of the greatest enemies America has ever faced, John S. McBush.