I tend to agree with Kevin Drum: the Clinton campaign isn't consciously trying to sabotage Barack Obama's campaign so as to continue to wield power. I don't think there's any sort of long-term strategy at work here, and that's always been the problem. Hillary Clinton could have gotten out while the getting was good and still have had a political future--not as president, probably, but she might have made a creditable chief of staff or cabinet secretary or something of that nature. If she'd dropped out after Wisconsin and Hawaii, nobody would have questioned it and she would have been able to maintain some influence. The fact that she has continued to soldier on, despite the mathematics, despite the potential damage done to the likely nominee, might be admirable in some sort of Hemingwayan sense, but it is simply difficult for Obama supporters who see the damage being done to get a handle on why she's still doing this. This is where Clinton Derangement Syndrome sets in--unless she's a terrible person, why do this except for some sort of twisted, Machiavellian maneuver? Or maybe she's just crazy? And what about that thing about her and McCain having the necessary experience and Obama not? The human mind struggles to find explanations for this behavior that aren't nefarious.
I tend to believe less in the Byzantine stories and more about the craziness: I think she wants to be president and that she is disconnected from the realities of the process. I think she thinks that there's a bunch of superdelegates that's leery of Obama and that's just waiting for a creditable excuse to bolt to her side. I think she thinks that she just needs to induce enough reasonable doubt for the SDs to flock to her. These are assumptions that might be right, but they're highly unlikely to be true, and together it seems pretty flimsy to keep it going. I don't think that the Clinton camp is thinking too much about the fallout of winning the wrong way, and given that Clinton's staff seems to consist of lackeys who are deathly afraid of delivering bad news to the candidate, I doubt she's likely to drop out soon.
In the end, I just think that Clinton is doing what she's doing out of pure denial. She really wants to be president, and that desire has undergirded her entire career. Eventually, she's going to have to come to grips with the reality that it's not going to happen, but it doesn't seem like she's going to spare us the spectacle of her destroying her reputation along the way.
