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All day Wednesday, topic one on the floor of the U.S. House was whether Hillary Clinton would drop out of the presidential race.
Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, a stalwart Clinton backer, heard it and pushed back with a firm rejoinder.
“Absolutely not.”
The Kansas City Democrat knows Clinton — “a woman possessed whether it’s running for political office, supporting someone for political office or pursuing legislation.
“She does not have a reverse gear.”
On Wednesday, after being crushed by a North Carolina landslide and eaking out an Indiana win, Clinton faced renewed calls for her to exit the bottomless Democratic race.
One of those came from one of her own backers, the 1972 Democratic nominee, George McGovern. Switching to Sen. Barack Obama, McGovern said Clinton’s chances had become “virtually impossible.”
But if Clinton was mired in self-doubt or deep thought over whether to exit, it wasn’t showing. The same day her camp said she’s lent her cause $6.4 million over the last month, she was in her usual mode — campaigning hard and seemingly looking forward.
“I’m staying in this race until there’s a nominee, and obviously I am going to work as hard as I can to become that nominee,” Clinton said in West Virginia, which has the next primary Tuesday. She also was meeting with undecided superdelegates, party leaders and elected officials who could end up the ultimate deciders.
That moving-ahead-no-matter-what approach is hardly surprising for a woman who’s battled levels of adversity far beyond that experienced by most people. Monica. Impeachment. Whitewater. The health-care debacle of 1994.
And this year, she’s escaped near-death experiences in New Hampshire and other states, struggled against some of the highest negatives in the field, emptied the war chest, faced an often hostile press and shrugged off accusations of pandering and low-blow campaigning.
“I think it’s obvious from the last few months that the Clintons are fighters to the end, and I think they have established a strategy of sticking out these remaining primaries through June 3,” said Leon Panetta, former chief of staff to President Clinton. “They’re going to stick to it and see what happens between now and then.”
The Clintons are unusual in the intensity of their focus, he said: “There is this very deep commitment to winning. That is who they are.”
Which leads to charges like this from Richelieu, blogger at The Weekly Standard: “Mrs. Clinton’s hand alone is on this throttle of Democratic fratricide and she appears to be accelerating the engine of Democrat destruction rather than easing it back.”
Yet her grit brings grudging admiration from others of her usual conservatives foes.
At the same time she drives the Democrats’ more liberal wing to furious distraction. To them, Clinton ambition is pushing the party to civil war while helping John McCain.
“You really can’t get more shameless than Hillary Clinton,” wrote AMERICAblog’s Joe Sudbay. “She, like her husband, will screw over the rest of the Democratic party for her own political gain.”
Discounting that dragging out the election is damaging, Clinton said Wednesday: “I just don’t believe that. I think we’ve had a historic record turnout by both of us bringing people into the Democratic Party.”
But the New York senator knows the ground has just tilted against her once more, said Carl Bernstein, author of a 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge. “She knows something huge has happened.
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