Let Her Do It Herself

I guess that one definition of a graceful exit would be to commit the ultimate gaffe...

Certainly frees Barry O from any pressure to have her as Veep.

Reactions around the world

Houston Chronicle blog:
So she has to hang around just in case Barack Obama gets shot? I tell you, the lady has completely taken leave of her senses.

Newsday:
Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager Donna Brazile, an uncommitted superdelegate who has been complimentary to Obama, told Newsday: "I am numb."

Andrew Sullivan:
I was on the stairmaster when the news came through. And I saw the apology as well - an apology to the Kennedy family, I might note, not to Senator Obama. Since some seem unwilling to point out why this remark was more than unfortunate, it is worth remembering that we have the first black candidate for president. You only have to spend a few minutes talking with African-Americans about this campaign to discover that the fear that Obama could be assassinated is very much on their minds. It is in everyone's subconscious, especially Michelle Obama's. To refer to the June assassination of Bobby Kennedy in the context of reasons to stay in this interminable race against Barack Obama is therefore catastrophically inappropriate. Coming after her pitch for "white votes", it is reckless....Yes, this season has gone on for ever. And for Senator Clinton, it has now obviously gone on too long.She's been waiting for Obama to implode. Instead, she just has.

Rolling Stone:
If there’s an innocent explanation for this, it escapes me.... And of all the weeks to be invoking dead Kennedy’s. She’s got a touch of Michael Savage in her, this one.UPDATE: Clinton apologizes… to the Kennedy’s. Not Obama... All class.

Dallas Morning News blog:
I said earlier that I couldn't imagine Clinton making things worse for herself. Well, OMG. She now says she is staying in the race just in case we have something happen like what happened to Robert Kennedy in 1968... I just don't know what to say.

CQ Politics:
Here's one way not to become Barack Obama's running mate.

National Post:
[O]ne wonders how much longer Democratic elders will stay silent."This is beyond the pale," Rep. James Clyburn, an undeclared superdelegate and the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, told the New York Times.Clinton just made a phenomenal political mistake, whatever her intent. Absent a primary or another significant political event over the Memorial Day weekend in the U.S., the assassination remark is all anyone will be talking about.In the past few weeks, Clinton has repeatedly appealed for more time to make her case to voters, more time so Florida and Michigan could count.She just gave Democrats a reason to say no.

Marc Ambinder & her Bobby Kennedy reference:
For those who contend that Clinton was referring to competitive contests or example, why didn't she bring up Ted Kennedy in 1980? Or Gary Hart in 1984? I think she was pointing to primary races where the eventual nominee was unknown at this point in the cycle.... But 1984 would apply more, her husband was the de-facto nominee at this point, and the compressed calender really renders such comparisons null and void.

Even if her point is legitimate, surely she is aware of the sensitivity of the subject

Howard Fineman :
She seems constitutionally incapable of just saying I screwed up and her lead footedness about this here is being observed by all the people who are still undecided about whom to back, the last 200 superdelegates here, they've got be looking at this and saying that this is a campaign that needs To Be Put Out Of Its Misery Real Soon"

In an ultimately way-over-the-top 'Special Comment' Olberman did provide a thorough list of the egregious things we have 'excused' from this woman's awful blight of a campaign (before himself running off the rails).

God knows, Senator, in this campaign, this nation has **had** to forgive you, early and often...And despite your now traditional position of the offended victim, the nation **has** forgiven you.

We have forgiven you your insistence that there have been widespread calls for you to end your campaign, when such calls had been few.

We have forgiven you your misspeaking about Martin Luther King's relative importance to the Civil Rights movement.

We have forgiven you your misspeaking about your under-fire landing in Bosnia.

We have forgiven you insisting Michigan's vote wouldn't count and then claiming those who would not count it were Un-Democratic.

We have forgiven you pledging to not campaign in Florida and thus disenfranchise voters there, and then claim those who stuck to those rules were as wrong as those who defended slavery or denied women the vote.

We have forgiven you the photos of Osama Bin Laden in an anti-Obama ad...

We have forgiven you fawning over the fairness of Fox News while they were still calling you a murderer.

We have forgiven you accepting Richard Mellon Scaife's endorsement and then laughing as you described his "deathbed conversion."

We have forgiven you quoting the electoral predictions of Boss Karl Rove.

We have forgiven you the 3 A-M Phone Call commercial.

We have forgiven you **President** Clinton's disparaging comparison of the Obama candidacy to Jesse Jackson's.

We have forgiven you Geraldine Ferraro's national radio interview suggesting Obama would not still be in the race had he been a white man.

We have forgiven you the dozen changing metrics and the endless self-contradictions of your insistence that your nomination is mathematically probable rather than a statistical impossibility.

We have forgiven you your declaration of some primary states as counting and some as not.

We have forgiven you exploiting Jeremiah Wright in front of the editorial board of the lunatic-fringe Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

We have forgiven you exploiting William Ayers in front of the debate on ABC.

We have forgiven you for boasting of your "support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans"...

We have even forgiven you repeatedly praising Senator McCain at Senator Obama's expense, and your **own** expense, and the Democratic **ticket's** expense.

But Senator, we cannot forgive you this.