Jonathan Chait writes:
Go Already!: The morning after Tuesday's primaries, Hillary Clinton's campaign released a memo titled "The Path to the Presidency."... [T]he memo offered a series of arguments as to why Clinton should run against John McCain... but nothing about how she actually could.... Clinton's path to the nomination is pretty repulsive.... Obama has a lead of 144 pledged delegates.... Clinton's Ohio win reduced that total by only nine. She would need 15 more Ohios to pull even with Obama. She isn't going to do much to dent, let alone eliminate, his lead.... [S]he would need to win with superdelegates... to capture the remaining ones by a margin of better than two to one.... The only way to lessen that reluctance would be to destroy Obama's general election viability.... Hence her flurry of attacks, her oddly qualified response as to whether Obama is a Muslim ("not as far as I know"), her repeated suggestions that John McCain is more qualified....
Clinton's path to the nomination... involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results at the polls.... I don't think she'd be in a position to defeat Hitler's dog in November, let alone a popular war hero.... Clinton's kamikaze mission is likely to be unusually damaging.... Pennsylvania is a swing state that Democrats will almost certainly need to win in November, and Clinton will spend seven weeks and millions of dollars there making the case that Obama is unfit to set foot in the White House. You couldn't create a more damaging scenario if you tried...
