By Dan Balz
Sen. Patrick Leahy has gone where no Democratic leader has dared go. It's time, the Vermont senator said, for Hillary Clinton to get out of the presidential race. "She ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama," he told Vermont Public Radio.
Clinton's campaign has spent the past two weeks trying to fight off such talk. The New York senator has argued her case that there are still 10 contests left on the calendar and that millions of Democrats deserve to be heard. She has argued that neither she nor Obama can hit the magic threshold of 2,024 delegates without the help of uncommitted superdelegates. She has argued -- correctly -- that pledged delegates aren't actually legally pledged to any candidate and can switch sides.
In every way possible, her campaign is trying to keep open any avenue that would help preserve a path to the nomination. Some of her leading fundraisers have tried to intimidate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi into backing away from comments widely interpreted as sympathetic to Obama. Her advisers continue to look for a solution that will bring Florida and particularly Michigan voters back into play. Those advisers have continued to seed doubts about Obama's strength as a general election candidate.
The bitterness and frustration on both sides is growing. Near-daily conference calls by the two campaigns heap invective upon invective. Even if most of what is said on those calls is quickly lost to history, their fevered nature enlarges the gulf that eventually will have to be bridged once there is a nominee.
Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean has given a series of interviews over the past 24 hours making two points. First, that the candidates and their advisers tone things down. Second, that superdelegates move quickly, once the primaries are over in early June, so that the fight doesn't spill onto the convention floor in Denver.
Dean said he remains confident that the party will know its nominee before the convention opens in late August. But he expressed doubt that anyone will be driven from the race prematurely. "Both these candidates believe that they can win this," he said. "And so I think we're going to be in for a tough primary fight between now and...June 3rd," he added.
Dean was dismissive that a council of party elders should step in and tell one of the candidates to quit. "Look, I've been a candidate. You don't step in and tell a candidate to get out of the race," he said on MSNBC Friday morning. "Nobody does that, and nobody's ever done that."
Well, Leahy has now done that. As an Obama supporter, he does not come to this as a neutral party. The question is whether he will embolden others, whether Obama supporters or neutral Democrats, to come forward and join him.
The presidential campaign is playing out in multiple venues right now. As recent polling has reminded everyone, developments obsessed over by talking heads often have far less resonance among most voters. For many Americans, what Obama and Clinton are saying every day about, say, the cost of health care or college tuition or job retraining or the home mortgage crisis is far more compelling.
But more and more Democrats are now worrying openly about the damage that the Clinton-Obama competition may inflict on the party. They fear that John McCain is getting a free ride as he opens his general election campaign. Some analysts say the answer to that is for Obama and Clinton to focus their attacks on McCain rather than each other.
The candidates try to follow that advice, as they did Thursday by going after McCain's views on the housing crisis. But, spurred on by their advisers and surrogates and supporters, they continue to be sucked into arguing with each other.
As she campaigns, Clinton sees enthusiastic supporters urging her to keep going. She is by nature a fighter -- a trait her advisers long have seen as one of her greatest attributes. Her husband demonstrated both in his 1992 campaign and during his presidency that hanging in when others might have quit can pay dividends. It's not in the Clintons' DNA to quit fighting. But she is also a political realist who understands as well as anyone the state of the Democratic race.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, another Obama supporter, said he hopes the Democratic race will come to a conclusion after the May 6 primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, an implicit warning to Clinton to get ready to wrap things up. But Leahy has now trumped that.
Leahy's comment may turn out to be the sound of one hand clapping, an observation by a politician given to speak his mind but not necessarily something that opens up a torrent of supporting commentary from others in the party. That is obviously Clinton's biggest worry and her campaign will be waiting nervously to see what happens next.
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