Relentless--Hillary Clinton

Rich Lowry:

SHE'S going to keep coming. The Obama campaign can tout "the math." Pundits can insist she leave the race. Former liberal supporters can complain about her smash-mouth tactics. But Hillary Clinton is not going to relent.

The New Yorker compares her this week to a Hollywood cyborg or zombie. To make a current movie analogy, she's the Anton Chigurh of Democratic politics.

As the creepy villain of the Oscar-winning "No Country for Old Men," the murderous Chigurh is an unstoppable force. If "No Country" is a movie about the inexorability of evil, the Democratic race could be about the inexorability of Hillary Clinton.

She's not electrifying on the stump, her campaign is dysfunctional, and - truth be told - she's not particularly experienced.

What Clinton has is a shameless will to power and a near lock on an old-school Democratic coalition built on working-class whites. That's enough for her to try to pry the nomination from Obama's hands one finger at a time.

When the Obama campaign and its supporters in the press say "the math" rules out Clinton, they mean that she will never catch Barack Obama in pledged delegates won through primaries and caucuses.

He probably will continue to lead her by about 100 pledged delegates out of roughly 3,200 total. But nothing says that the leader in pledged delegates wins the nomination.

Either candidate will need superdelegates - the 800 party poobahs free to vote for whomever they please - to get to the magic number of 2,025 total delegates.

"Math" obsessives assume that the superdelegates will go with whoever has the most pledged delegates. But why?

After Ohio and Texas, Clinton trails Obama in the overall popular vote by only 600,000 votes out of 25 million cast. If you count Florida and Michigan, which weren't contested, she leads him slightly.

And Obama padded his pledged-delegate lead with overwhelming wins in caucuses that aren't as open and democratic as primaries.

In the hybrid primary-caucus state of Texas, Clinton beat Obama by three points and 100,000 votes in a primary where 3 million people voted. But Obama will get more pledged delegates out of the state because he beat Clinton in a caucus where 100,000 people participated.

And Obama is the candidate of people power?

...

I think the Obama for VP ploy is a sop to the Super Delegates who seem to think Obama has earned something from his campaign. His comeback yesterday by cleverly using her 3 a.m. ad suggest he is not ready to go along with that game. I can understand why he would not be interested. If being President is hard, working for Hillary is even harder.