Anna Quindlen leads this week's roundup of media winners and sinners

Enough already.

The time for Hillary Clinton to leave the playing field is now. The steady stream of superdelegates to Obama, which has continued unabated through Clinton's big victories in West Virginia and Kentucky, proves that none of the power brokers who matter in the Democratic party believe that she should be the nominee. So there are only two things she can achieve by staying in the race: an even larger campaign debt, and an even more deeply divided Democratic party.

In 1968, one of the most important reasons Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon by a tiny margin was the failure of Gene McCarthy to rally his antiwar supporters to Humphrey's cause. The result was the inauguration of a 40-year-long domination of American politics by the Republican party. Unless Clinton withdraws now and begins to fight for Barack Obama instead of against him, she will be remembered as the Gene McCarthy of 2008—for preventing the start of a new era of Democratic domination of the national government.

Writing more in sorrow than in anger, Anna Quindlen did a brilliant job of explaining all this in Newsweek. As a longtime Clinton supporter, Quindlen's words should carry extra authority with the foundering candidate.

"In recent weeks Senator Clinton has gone down a dark road from a Democratic perspective," Quindlen wrote. "Whether embracing a bogus gas-tax break, vowing to 'totally obliterate' Iran if it goes after Israel or noting that hardworking white folks like her better than her black opponent, she seemed to be running a tutorial in Karl Rove 101, the Republican primer of diversion, aggression and division."

(It's no wonder Hillary was citing Rove again this week, because he supposedly believes she would make the strongest candidate for the Democrats in the fall.)

Quindlen said, "The question now is not when this race will be over, but who exactly Senator Clinton will be when it is done." If she doesn't stop now, she will be remembered as "the progressive feminist with the Ivy League credentials" who took "a campaign detour in which her slogan might as well have been 'the candidate of white folks who believe despite all evidence to the contrary that the other guy is a Muslim.'" This, said the Newsweek columnist, is not a legacy worthy of the most successful woman candidate for president of all time.

As George Packer made clear in this week's New Yorker, what makes Hillary's departure all the more urgent is the strong evidence that Barack Obama's election could be the death knell for the modern American conservative movement. Packer begins his 8,500-word opus this way: "The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. ... The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the 2008 race is the last one standing—despite being despised by significant voices on the right—shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces."

Packer cites dozens of reasons for the movement's demise, from the nepotism of Norman Podhoretz, which led to the appointment of his incompetent son as his successor as editor of Commentary, to the anti-Semitism of Bill Buckley, revealed in a memo unearthed last year by Sam Tanenhaus, in which Buckley refused to anoint David Brooks as his successor at National Review because he is "not a believing Christian."

The main reason of course, is that the movement's signature achievement is an entirely negative one. According to David Frum, "The core task was to stop and reverse, to some degree, the drift of democratic countries after the Second World War toward social democracy. And that was done."

Of course, that is really only true of one important democratic country—the United States. And the result is that we are hopelessly behind every other developed democracy in the world, by every reasonable measure—from the absence of universal health care to the presence of the largest prison population anywhere.

Packer suggests that demographics are what make Obama's election plausible—because the number of "minorities and educated professionals working in post-industrial jobs is expanding far faster than the white working class." This was the original vision of McGovern adviser Fred Dutton, whose 1971 book, Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s, "foresaw a rising 'coalition of conscience and decency' among baby boomers. The new politics was an electoral disaster in 1972, but it may finally triumph in 2008. If not, it will be because Democrats still can't win the presidency without the working-class Americans who remain the swing vote and, this year, are up for grabs more than ever."

Update: Bizarre is the kindest word for Clinton's reference to Bobby Kennedy's assassination. This extraordinary insensitivity must be the product of absolute exhaustion, That does not make it less unconscionable. The time to go is now.

(Special thanks to FCP contributor JH.)