A Silver Lining In the Blue Battle

Hillary Clinton has proved during the past few months that she is a fighter, that she is tenacious, and that she is in the race to win. There's just one problem. She's already lost.

No matter how you define victory, Barack Obama holds an insurmountable lead in the race to earn the Democratic nomination. He leads in the one metric that matters most: the pledged delegates chosen directly by Democratic voters. But he also leads in the popular vote,

the number of states won and money raised. Still, Obama's advantages aren't large enough to allow him an outright victory. He needs the 20 percent of party delegates who aren't bound to a candidate. It's with these superdelegates that Clinton has staked her ephemeral chances.

Clinton's near-lone chance of victory rests with a coup by superdelegate, persuading enough of them to overcome the primary voters' preference. Yet a coup by elite Democrats would be ill-received, to put it mildly. Obama's base spans the party's most loyal and engaged constituencies: African-Americans, professionals who generate hundreds of millions in small-dollar donations and a conventional-wisdom-defying outpouring of youth support.

If Obama lost at the polling booth, these supporters would accept the voters' verdict and carry on. Many, including those who backed Howard Dean's heartbreaking 2004 campaign, have been through such disappointment before. But if Beltway bigwigs steal a hard-won victory, it would amount to a declaration of civil war. Not only would the resolve of thousands of loyal foot soldiers and the party's new fund-raising base be irrevocably shaken, but it would torpedo the opportunity to build and strengthen a new generation of Democrats.

Clinton's best-case scenario for victory requires sundering her own party. It is an inherently divisive strategy, but she doesn't appear to care. For Clinton, all's fair in pursuit of victory—even destroying her party from within. Her campaign has adopted a bizarre "insult-40-states strategy," which has belittled states small, liberal and Red. Apparently, the only states that matter are the ones she coincidentally happens to win.

The Clinton campaign once justified efforts to foster a superdelegate insurrection by suggesting that she could regain the popular-vote lead in the remaining contests. But as her chances of pulling off that feat dwindle, even that argument is falling by the wayside. In an interview with TPM Election Central, top campaign adviser Harold Ickes said: "I think being ahead in the popular vote is an important factor. I don't think it's dispositive." But when the popular vote, delegates earned and states won aren't dispositive, no rationale remains for her destructive coup attempt. Clinton, unfortunately, is pretending not to notice. So at the moment, it's useless to demand she exit the race. If logic, math, appeals to party unity and the evaporation of undecided superdelegates won't sway her, nothing will.

Yet while the Beltway establishment frets about the alleged damage this drawn-out contest is doing to the Democratic Party, in reality, it's been an almost unalloyed good.