Hillary is getting hammered (by the press)

By Benjamin van der Horst

The press, just like my colleague Jeremy Barr below, is starting to call for Hillary Clinton’s withdrawal from the race. Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter wrote a scathing column titled “Hillary Should Get Out Now.” He argues that this is her last chance for a graceful exit and for her own political future should get out of the race, despite the fact that personally Alter would love for the race to go on. He writes:

Withdrawing would be stupid if Hillary had a reasonable chance to win the nomination, but she doesn’t…Hillary has only one shot—for Obama to trip up so badly that he disqualifies himself. Nothing in the last 14 months suggests he will.

But Alter is not the only one being critical of Hillary.

New York Times Op-Ed columnist Frank Rich mocked Clinton in his column “The Audacity of Hopelessness” (a play of words off Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope) comparing her campaign to the War in Iraq. He writes:

The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

Rich then compares Mark Penn, Clinton’s chief strageist, to Donald Rumsfeld. Before listing examples of how Obama’s campaign has been more organized in nearly every state, he writes

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done.

The rest of the column continues the Iraq analogy, calling Obama’s campaign the insurgency and doubting that Clinton can do a “surge” to victory. It’s a very amusing and interesting read.