It has been fairly apparent for weeks (for those of us who weren't blinded by our candidate loyalties) that Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the nomincation are slim to none.  Now, her chances have completely disappeared.  During this time her campaign has been waging a poison pill strategy against Obama by throwing every damaging or potentially damaging thing they could at him in order to wound him so badly that they could make their electability argument. 

But why?  What has the point been given that the chances of succeeding were so dismal at the outset?

It hasn't taken a rocket scientist to figure out she can't win enough delegates and last night's results have, for all intents and purposes, put an end to her campaign.  She may lim along for a bit now, but she has failed in her bid to take out Obama.  The nomination is now within easy reach for him.  Even the tv pundits were finally openly saying she's been jousting with windmills for weeks, but that until last night one could make a plausible, if unlikely, case that she still had a realistic shot.

As I see it, the upshot of her attempted take down of Obama over these past couple of months is essentially that she has damaged both herself and Obama as candidates now and in the future.  I read a newspaper column about a week ago suggesting "the Clinton's" real purpose now was to essentially ruin Obama's chances in the fall so she could run again in four years before she gets too old.  I don't want to believe that's the truth, but one has to wonder why the Clinton campaign adopted the advice of Mark Penn by waging a virtual scorched earth campaign against Obama attempting to poison white working class voters against him.

Now, I'm not one of the Obama "movement" people who thinks he represent a paradigm shift or any of the rest of that wooly hero worship some of his followers have succumbed to.  I think he, like Hillary, is just another centrist/corporate Democrat in a new package and that if elected, it's unlikely he will bring about any substantive changes in policies and programs of the Federal government and certainly the politics of Washington will not be changed.  Nonetheless, unless something totally unforseen by everyone occurs, Obama will be the Democratic nominee for President.  The fight with the Republicans is not going to be pretty and he will need everyone's assistance to limp across the finish line ahead of McCain.  We simply cannot afford another term of Republican corruption, endless unsuccessful imperial wars, and obscene military spending and waste.  So what on earth could the rationale of the Clinton campaign be for the battle they have waged since Super Tuesday?

Hillary finds herself now having blown millions on her unsuccessful bid for the Presidency while also having completely and forever disgraced herself, in the eyes of many of us, in terms of the tactics and appalling hypocrisy she has stooped to.  The Big Dog's reputation has also suffered as a result of the Republican style campaign conducted by Hillary's organization since Super Tuesday.  What possible rationale could have justified the course she took?  What could she have been thinking by choosing to do what she has done both to herself and to Obama?  I don't know if we'll ever really know, but I doubt any good will come of it.