Should Hillary stop plodding on?

I must admit that the vagaries of United States politics sometimes confuse me when Hillary Clinton wins a primary in a place which isn't even a state and which I understand cannot vote in the November elections. Kooky or what? Anyway Hillary is using her overwhelming victory in the Puerto Rico Democratic primary to justify her fighting on in a race in which she cannot possibly achieve the requisite number of delegates to pass the winning post.

Neither, it must be said, can Barack Obama, but he is overwhelmingly ahead on delegate count and it would take some amazing logic for the super-delegates to throw their weight behind Mrs Clinton now. But amazing logic is what Hillary keeps pushing in their faces. She is ahead in the popular vote, she says, and how can they throw her over with that as a statistic? Well, even if that is true, one has to look at the demographics before taking that too much at face value. Hillary, when she has won primaries, has done so by overwhelming majorities and they are in states where the Democratic blue collar vote has been decisive. Hillary is the gal for the working class, of that there is little doubt.



But Obama has not only taken votes from a wider spectrum across the electorate, he has taken them in more states. Hillary claims that she leads McCain in all opinion polls comparing the two but, if Obama was once behind on that score, I don't believe that to be the case now.

What will help the Democratic Party to win the next Presidential election -as I sincerely hope they will - is if this close, exciting but surely now counter-productive in- fighting comes to an end. It is pretty clear that by all the mechanisms through which the Democratic Party anoints its chosen one, Barack Obama is the clear winner. In my opinion, it would now be in the Party's, and the country's , interest if some considerable pressure was exerted on Mrs. Clinton to call it a day and to step away from the fray with dignity and an awful lot of respect for a gallant fight.

If she continues much longer it is surely to the detriment of the Democratic Party and simply lessens the amount of time the Democrats have to pull together around one banner to fight their Republican opponent. What's more Hillary Clinton, rather than looking like a gallant politician who fought and lost gallantly, will look like a selfish woman who puts her own prospects ahead of the interests of her party and her country.

If that happens and the Democrats lose in November she may not be very quickly forgiven.