Nothing will get Hillary out of the race

Even though she won by a 10-point margin and not the blow-out victory in Pennsylvania she was predicting a month ago; even though Barack Obama is decisively ahead in both the delegate count and the national popular vote in all Democratic primaries and caucuses this far; even though polls show Americans think Obama would handle a 2am crisis as well if not better than Hillary; even though other polls show Obama would fare as well if not better than Hillary against McCain; even though her campaign is $9m in the red and Obama has $42m in the bank; even though...

Multiply the 'even thoughs' by a factor of 50 and Hillary insists on staying in the game.

The only two substances that definitively get someone to quit running for president are gold or lead. In Mrs Clinton's case even their potency might fail. Gold, in this case the lack of it in the form of campaign funds, wouldn’t stop her tottering into the next round of primaries on a shoe-string.

And even if - perish the thought - an assassin stepped from behind a rhododendron bush and laid Mrs Clinton low, we'd have Bill Clinton insisting that a generic Clinton family candidacy for the Democratic nomination be kept in play, while he simultaneously sought repeal of the 22nd amendment which bars US presidents from serving more than two terms.

Bill's on record saying that while no president should serve three consecutive terms, a two-term president should be able to clamber back into the White House for a third stint after a respite in private life.

Now the primary campaign heads off to Indiana and North Carolina amid a steady downpour of news stories about the mathematical impossibility of Hillary Clinton outstripping Barack Obama in either the delegate count or the popular vote.

But math isn't the issue here. Mrs Clinton is set to stay in the race until the roll-call at the Democratic convention in Denver on August 27 conclusively settles the issue.

A popular line is that this interminable struggle between Obama and Clinton is good news for the Republican candidate, John McCain. While the Democrats bicker in the playpen, he can issue statesmanlike bulletins on matters of national importance.

The flaw here is McCain's inability to address matters of national importance in any serious way, beyond calling for endless war in Iraq.

McCain gets soft-treatment from the claque on his press bus, but the going could rapidly get rough for him. Just as John Kerry got whacked for false claims about his war record in 2004, McCain is already on the receiving end of charges (most recently on the CounterPunch website and newsletter I coedit) that as a POW 'hero' McCain collaborated with his captors for three years and was on Vietnamese radio so often he was tagged as 'the PW Songbird'.

Meanwhile Cliff Schecter, author of The Real McCain says an AP reporter "recounted to me seeing John McCain wander off into the red-light district of Hanoi in 1996 when he was there to normalise relations with the Vietnamese", and that "a few reporters told me the McCains don't really live together anymore, and that until the campaign Cindy McCain spent much of her time in San Diego with their daughter, because her husband was just not Johnny-on-the-spot anymore."

McCain certainly has nothing of consequence to say on the issue most disturbing Americans, viz that they cannot afford the fuel needed to drive to work and what jobs haven't already been outsourced to China or India are fast disappearing. 'Home' means a refrigerator depleted by soaring food prices, children facing a lifetime of debt peonage for their student loans and a mortgage with variable interest rates suddenly ballooning to 13.5 per cent.

Every candidate has some sort of problem. McCain has his legendary temper, rendering him probably the most unstable candidate in American history to be one election away from the White House. Obama has the Rev Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and a Chicago realtor called Tony Rezko now on trial. There could be some unexploded bombs there, not least Rezko's financial relationship with the extremely rich UK-based Iraqi, Nadhmi Auchi.

Hillary has her ball and chain in the form of her husband. Bill has continued to jam his foot in his mouth on an almost daily basis, culminating in a tortured effort yesterday to claim it was Obama, not him, who had played the race card in South Carolina.

After delivering himself of this strange judgement he sought to reaffirm his credentials as a friend of blacks by declaring that he had established an office in Harlem.

On that reasoning, the investment bank Dawnay Day Group, which bought 47 buildings and 1,137 homes in East Harlem in March for £250m, should run for the Nobel Peace Prize.

He also claimed that if the primaries had been run under Republican rules, Hillary would already be the nominee. But then, Bill always liked working with Republicans. ·