photo credit: numlok™ 

Doesn’t it seem strange that with 10 straight losses, Hillary Clinton still clings to the desparate notion that she can win this thing? Any other candidate, including Obama, would be under intense pressure to bow out of the raise if suffering from similar losses. It’s always the next state where she’ll turn things around — we heard it this week with polls showing her ahead, and pundits expecting a Hillary resurrection. And then Obama beats her by 15 points.

Look, I’m not going to say that she can’t do it, but after a week of negative campaigning — with some pretty tough lines of attack at that — she still wasn’t able to close the gap in Wisconsin. In fact, if you were to compare the actual results to the polls, the gap actually widened.

The only thing staying in the race serves is to 1) give weight to the conspiracy theorists who believe that she’s going to steal the nomination, and 2) keep our party from having a candidate who can engage John McCain over the summer. If this things drags on until the convention in August, there’s nothing stopping McCain from campaigning against Obama on one flank, while he’s still engaged with Hillary on the other.

If Hillary had any honor or decency, she would concede if she lost Texas and Ohio, but we know now that she has none. The sad fact that we’re all waking up to now is that the “smears” and “slanders” the Republicans launched against the Clintons were 100% true. We were just unwilling to believe it until we saw her use the same sleazy tactics on another Democrat. She’ll fight this all the way to the convention, and continue to use strongarm tactics on delegates to try to subvert the will of the voters. The party is now splitting into two factions, and if something isn’t done to reconcile the two soon, the ultimate winner of the nominations risks losing half the party due to the Obama-Clinton rift.

If Hillary continues her losing streak, I hope her advisors, friends and colleagues in the party will have the good sense to pressure her to get out of the race. If she wins, fair enough. But if she loses, she needs to wake up to reality and concede.