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Posted
Tuesday, June 03, 2008 4:17 PM
| By
Christopher Beam
Campaigning yesterday in Milbank, S.D., Bill Clinton effectively declared the race over,
saying, "[T]his may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of
this kind." Clinton's advance team was told its work was done. Her
schedule remains empty after Tuesday night. Even if she doesn't bid
farewell tonight, Clinton and everyone around her know her chances are
a near-nothing of 0.1 percent. (It would be zero, but she still hasn't dropped out.) She is asymptotically dead.
So today is less about what than how. How Obama is going to roll out the necessary delegates to reach the "magic number" of 2,118. How (and when) Clinton is officially going to concede. How she is going to transition into the "healing" phase of the general election.
Still,
the day's news has been an ongoing game of "will she or won't she?"
This morning, the Associated Press reported that Clinton campaign
officials said she would concede Tuesday night that Obama has the
delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. The Clinton camp quickly
denied the report. (Disagreement in Hillaryland? Never!) So the AP took a different tack, declaring
the race over based on a tally of public commitments and "more than a
dozen private commitments." But seeing as the superdelegate metric has
always been about public commitments, it's unclear why that's news. ...
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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