Look, people need to stop asking, demanding, begging, rationalizing, insisting, pleading, negotiating, and using any and all other manners of persuasion to try and get Hillary to quit. She is not going to quit. She moved to New York 8 years ago with the express purpose of running for President in 2008. And were she to win, she would immortalize herself. As long as there was a United States, people would know the name Hillary Clinton. Amelia Earhart wouldn't have anything on President Hillary Clinton (for that matter, Barack Obama is running for the same thing). If you had an opportunity to immortalize yourself - to make sure that people are talking about you hundreds of years from now - how hard would you fight to make that happen? Do you see why Hillary isn't going anywhere?
This puts Barack Obama in an awkward position. The race is over, but his opponent isn't quitting. He finds himself running two races now - running out the string against Clinton, and the general election against McCain. And that is one race too many. He needs to let one of these races go, and focus on the other one. And I, for one, can see no benefit to continuing to fight a fight that has already been won.
A common complaint about the Clinton campaign is that "they keep moving the goalposts." Well, of course they are going to do that - they need to, in order to justify their continued presence in the race. If they didn't, they would have been gone a long, long time ago. The question people ought to be asking is, if the Clinton campaign insists on changing the rules, why is Barack willing to play their game in the first place?
The media? Please. The media are a bunch of sheep, waiting for someone to herd them. If Hillary Clinton insists the race is still competitive, and Obama continues to go along with this notion, then the media are naturally going to portray the race as competitive because a) a competitive race benefits them, and b) they are too lazy to construct their own narratives. Who among the talking head pundits actually questions conventional wisdom? I haven't even heard Keith Olbermann say, "this race is over." But if Obama switched over to general election mode, full-time, then Hillary would be left in the dark. Because as much as the media likes a competitive primary race, the general election is where the big bucks are, and if they have permission to make the jump, they'll do it. If Barack started going after McCain tomorrow, by Saturday Hillary Clinton would have to run naked through Times Square just to remind us that she still exists.
"Ignore her, and she'll go away." That's what my mom used to tell me when I would complain to her about my sister's behavior. And now I pass that advice on to Obama. Don't respond to her attacks - just wait for John McCain to parrot them, and then attack him. We keep hearing about how Obama is reserved now that he is fighting a Democrat, but once it's just him and McCain, he'll really unleash the hounds. Fine, then. He consider it the case. Hillary can't win, and Obama knows it.
He's got the perfect opportunity coming up. He is going to win North Carolina by 25 points. Once that is done, I don't want to hear Barack Obama say the words "Senator Clinton" again.