Opinion: Should Hillary quit? A round-up
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Is North Carolina the fat lady that sang for Hillary Clinton? The editorial board suggested that it’s finally over for her, and L.A. Times columnist Rosa Brooks called it way back in March. The Hill reports that backs are turning on her. What are the other papers saying?
The Washington Post editorial board focuses on Barack Obama even as it comes to the same conclusion on Clinton:
Hillary Clinton may, as she promised yesterday, fight on through the next few weeks of primaries, but after her disappointing showing Tuesday she has no plausible route to victory. So Mr. Obama was sounding themes for the coming battle against John McCain.... These are familiar phrases by now, appealing but also insubstantial.
Its columnists Harold Meyerson and George F. Will agree...
Meyerson said Clinton is out and blamed it on a late-in-the-game strategy switch:
Had she run as the caring populist from the outset, she might have prevailed. But her conversion from the most experienced candidate to the most caring (which entailed sacking strategist Mark Penn, who never understood how much the economy had changed since the late ‘90s) came too late.
Will says she was late on a lot of things -- including realizing she had a strong challenger in Obama.
The New York Times editorial board makes no such pronunciation against their once-endorsed home-state candidate, and columnist Gail Collins looks at the bright side: ‘After this campaign, nobody in America can ever seriously argue that women aren’t capable of being in armed combat. She is strong. She is invincible. Or, at minimum, extremely hard to discourage.’ Collins’ fellow columnist Nicholas D. Kristof seems to want her gone so she doesn’t hand the election to John McCain, but grants Clinton the sexism point: ‘One of the political lessons of this year — backed by psychological research and polling data — is that the bar is probably higher for a woman candidate for president than for a black candidate.’
The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger characterizes Clinton’s current standing by saying she ‘now resembles the robot’s crawling hand in the final scenes of ‘The Terminator’’ and says for Obama, it’s about race:
The superdelegates are faced with choosing between the Clinton machine’s brutal demographic math and thinking well of themselves. No contest. Will the national electorate sing from the same hymnal as the superdelegates’ offstage chorus? Who knows, but let’s get on with finding out.
I’ll end with Karl Rove’s words of wisdom, from a Journal piece called, ‘It’s Obama, Warts and All’:
Almost everything we think we know right now will be revised and even overturned during the next six months. This has been a race in which conventional wisdom has often been proven wrong. The improbable or thought-to-be impossible has happened with regularity. It has created a boom market for punditry and opinion offering, and one of the grandest possible spectacles for political junkies in decades. Hold on to your hat. It’s going to be one heck of a ride through Nov. 4.
UPDATE: The NYT editorial board chimes in on May 9:
There is a lot of talk that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now fated to lose the Democratic nomination and should pull out of the race. We believe it is her right to stay in the fight and challenge Senator Barack Obama as long as she has the desire and the means to do so. That is the essence of the democratic process. But we believe just as strongly that Mrs. Clinton will be making a terrible mistake — for herself, her party and for the nation — if she continues to press her candidacy through negative campaigning with disturbing racial undertones.