The Note: Tired Eyes

April 2, 2008 -- Amid the delegate count and the popular vote, campaign debts and wounded egos, the biggest single obstacle facing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign is fatigue.

There's fatigue for her and her staff, as a race that was supposed be over two months ago marches wearily forward with no end in sight.

There's fatigue with the Clintons, the Obama-fueling sense of being ready to move on from a first family of Democratic politics that's been less than perfect as a steward of party fortunes.

There's fatigue with the campaign as a whole -- a sentiment that may be spilling into polls and (more importantly) could have a corrosive effect on superdelegates.

And there's fatigue of messaging, as a campaign that's consistently trailed in efforts to inspire voters looks for a way to make the race about something big -- anything to change the discussion in this non-voting interregnum that's looking like a slow, painful bleed.

Bowl-offs are all well and good -- but does Clinton really think what the Democratic Party craves is another "Rocky" installment?

Those were jokes, of course (and it's good to know she's got the energy to run up those steps), but consider this: Clinton's serious argument for staying in the race when she's down for good in the delegate count is, at bottom, about votes for voting's sake.

"The last time that we were told we'd better cut the process short or the sky would fall was when the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount in 2000," Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams wrote in a memo released Tuesday. "But Chicken Little was wrong. What was true then is true now: there is nothing to fear -- and everything to gain – from hearing from all of the voters."

Invoking Florida is "a ratcheting-up of rhetoric in the ongoing debate over whether the New York Senator's candidacy is hindering Democrats' chances of winning back the White House," Washingtonpost.com's Chris Cillizza writes.

"Choosing to compare the pressure Clinton is coming under to end her candidacy with the pressure on Gore to do the same in 2000 is sure to inflame the passions -- for good and for ill."

"In fact, they're the ones who need the imperfect, undemocratic system -- the superdelegates -- to bail them out," Slate's Christopher Beam writes. "Unless superdelegates push Clinton up and over Obama's inevitable pledged delegate lead, she can't win. . . . So really, if the 2008 Democratic primaries are the 2000 Florida debacle, then Clinton is Bush."

"It seems as if the Clinton strategy is to focus the campaign on campaigning," Steve Benen writes at the Carpetbagger Report.

"Given the microphone, Clinton is using it to talk about how important it is that she keep getting the microphone. . . . But that's not a compelling campaign pitch; in fact, it's hardly a pitch at all. There's no reason to keep talking about why the race should continue; the race is continuing by virtue of Clinton's ongoing efforts."

Yes, Rocky got up the stairs of the Art Museum in Philadelphia, but -- as ABC's Jake Tapper (a Philly boy) reminds us -- "Rocky lost." (Also, recall for us again who the champ was at the beginning of this movie? That's not even mentioning the progressively worse Stallone efforts that were the five sequels. . . . )

It turns out that former President Bill Clinton wasn't quite as chill as he wanted everyone else to be at California's Democratic Party convention. "Before his speech Clinton had one of his famous meltdowns Sunday, blasting away at former presidential contender Bill Richardson for having endorsed Obama, the media and the entire nomination process," Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross report in the San Francisco Chronicle.

At a private meeting that included superdelegates, Clinton "went on a tirade that ran from the media's unfair treatment of Hillary to questions about the fairness of the votes in state caucuses that voted for Obama," Matier and Ross write. "It ended with him asking delegates to imagine what the reaction would be if Obama was trailing by just 1 percent and people were telling him to drop out."

He had special anger reserved for Richardson, and it gets a little more personal on Wednesday: Inside the New Mexico governor's pushback at James Carville (who called him "Judas" for his endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama) is a broader argument that he's not the only Democrat to make -- but one of the few to make this publicly.

"It is this kind of political venom that I anticipated from certain Clinton supporters and I campaigned against in my own run for president," Richardson writes in a Washington Post op-ed, adding that the discussion was "heated" when he told Sen. Clinton of his decision. (We can imagine.)

"I can only say that we need to move on from the politics of personal insult and attacks," Richardson continues. "That era, personified by Carville and his ilk, has passed and I believe we must end the rancor and partisanship that has mired Washington in gridlock. In my view, Sen. Obama represents our best hope of replacing division with unity."

A new endorsement for Obama makes Clinton's argument against him just a little bit tougher. "He comes across to me as pragmatic, visionary and tough," Lee Hamilton, co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission (and a former House member from Indiana), tells Bloomberg's Julianna Goldman.

The deep desire for resolution is behind the party's discontent with its chairman, Howard Dean, who is either incapable or unwilling (or very possibly both) to push the nominating process toward an end.

"It is not clear that Mr. Dean has the political skills or the stature with the two campaigns to bring the nominating battle to a relatively quick and unifying conclusion," Adam Nagourney writes in The New York Times. "Senior officials in both campaigns said they had heard rarely from Mr. Dean on matters like the tone of the contest and how it might be concluded and what to do about the Michigan and Florida delegates, the subject of a bitter and potentially debilitating debate between the Clinton and Obama campaigns."