The Hillary Clinton Deathwatch

Slate has a deathwatch for Clinton, right now she's at a 12% chance to win the nomination:

Hillary Clinton is as good as dead. This became the consensus over the past week, when the media awoke en masse to the dual reality that 1) Clinton can't close the pledged-delegate gap and 2) Obama has her beat in the popular vote. But the Clinton campaign shows no signs of slowing—she said herself she's prepared to compete for at least three more months. So the question now is not just "How dead is she?" but "When will she realize it?"

[...]

To start off, we're putting her odds at a generous 12 percent. (Last week, a Clinton campaign official gave her one-in-10 odds.) At the moment, polls indicate that Obama has survived the Jeremiah Wright flap (for now). Clinton's Bosnia blunder has metastasized from a headache into a five-day circus. Bill Richardson finally climbed down from his fence onto Obama's side. And a Michigan court yesterday deemed the state's Jan. 15 primary unconstitutional and declined to order a revote, effectively smothering the last glimmer of hope for a deus ex Michigana bailout. Meanwhile, a new poll puts her favorability rating at 37 percent—its lowest since March 2001..

Don't people get it? They're treating her like she's normal. She's not a normal politician, she's not going to give up. This is her nomination and I doubt if she'll let a junior senator from Illinois steal it from her. I'd be shocked if she gave up before Denver. Obama is going to have to wrestle the nomination from her cold, dead hands after he's vanquished her.

And when the superdelegates let Dean know by July 1 who they pick, it had better not be close or Clinton will not let it end until she gets the delegates from Michigan and Florida.

BTW, I can't believe her favorable numbers are so low! That's the lowest I have seen them during this campaign. I can't see how she gets the nomination with that approval rating. Wouldn't the superdelegates realize they can't run her against McCain with such a huge negative number?

Peggy Noonan noted a change in attitude toward Hillary among even her supporters:

I went to a Hillary fund-raiser at Hunter College about a month ago, paying for a seat in the balcony and being ushered up to fill the more expensive section on the floor, so frantic were they to fill seats.

I sat next to a woman, a New York Democrat who'd been for Hillary from the beginning and still was. She was here. But, she said, "It doesn't seem to be working." She shrugged, not like a brokenhearted person but a practical person who'd missed all the signs of something coming. She wasn't mad at the voters. But she was no longer so taken by the woman who soon took the stage and enacted joy.

The other day a bookseller told me he'd been reading the opinion pages of the papers and noting the anti-Hillary feeling. Two weeks ago he realized he wasn't for her anymore. It wasn't one incident, just an accumulation of things. His experience tracks this week's Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showing Mrs. Clinton's disapproval numbers have risen to the highest level ever in the campaign, her highest in fact in seven years.

Thank you, Obama for driving a stake through the heart of the Clintons. You have to make sure that PA or some wacky superdelegates don't remove it.

(via)