ON DEADLINE: What if Clinton had Obama's lead?

Getting out is hard to do for any presidential candidate, doubly so when the name is Clinton. Hillary or Bill, graceful exits are not the Clinton style. Lose an election or an issue and they tend to dig in deeper.

So while Hillary's campaign game is almost up, while she can cling to the slightest chance of overtaking Barack Obama, she won't concede the Democratic presidential nomination.

It is pure guesswork, but consider what would be happening if the roles of Clinton and Obama were reversed, giving her an all but insurmountable lead. The party unity pressure on him to get out, if he hadn't already, would be far more intense than the suggestions that Clinton go. They'd be depicting him as a spoiler. Some of Clinton's people already see him that way - the first-term black senator who got in the way when Clinton was running on a strategy that presumed a quick victory.

Besides, had Obama been the one on the ropes, getting out would have served his future as well as the party's. At 46, he already has put his imprint on political history as the first black candidate to mount a major national campaign for the presidency. That would make him a formidable entry in 2012.

At 60, Clinton is not too old to try again. But she may be too familiar; the long experience she claims also wears on the image.

Then there's money. To keep going, Clinton has loaned her campaign $11.4 million of the fortune she and Bill have reaped since leaving the White House at a time they were in debt. She complains about being outspent in the primaries, which is an unintended compliment to Obama's remarkable ability to raise funds, largely from small donors.

Reverse campaign finance roles and Obama would be long gone. He can't write checks for that kind of money.

Any campaign for the White House is consuming, demanding, incredibly rigorous. It becomes a lifestyle over the months and years it now requires. So giving up before the last fragment of hope is gone is a bitterly difficult step. In Clinton's case, it means swallowing defeat after beginning as the consensus favorite, the candidate all but entitled to the top of the 2008 ticket.

Uniting the party behind a candidate other than herself is not high on Hillary's agenda. Neither Clinton has a record of catering to the needs of the Democratic Party. The C at the beginning of the name Clinton counts more than the D at the beginning of Democrat.

When Bill Clinton came to the White House, the Democrats controlled the House and Senate. When he left, Republicans did. In 1996, he soaked up campaign dollars even though he was virtually guaranteed re-election, and other Democratic campaign organizations had to scramble for what was left.

For all that, Hillary Clinton is losing narrowly, not overwhelmingly. She has indeed won in big states, as she recites at her campaign rallies. Campaigning on, as she says she will until there is a Democratic nominee, is neither far out nor quixotic. Obama is careful not to claim the mantle of presumptive nominee, saying he will win, not that he has.

His lead in pledged delegates is insurmountable. To reverse it, Clinton would have to win three-quarters of the delegates still up for primary election, which isn't going to happen.

Nor is the fiction Bill Clinton talked about as he campaigned in West Virginia going to become fact. "They want you to vote in low numbers so she doesn't get ahead in the popular vote," he said in Sutton, W. Va., on Thursday.

She can't get ahead in the popular vote.

That leaves the superdelegates, about 260 of them still undecided. They are Clinton's last, best hope, but over the past week, Obama has been gaining, nearly erasing her earlier lead in that count.

The tactics used in the offstage effort to persuade superdelegates could dent future Democratic unity. Clinton tactics are hard-knuckled. Her superdelegate chief, Harold Ickes, has been trying to recruit them by talking about Obama's incendiary former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, saying that connection could alienate voters in the fall campaign.

That, plus Clinton's own campaign argument that Obama can't win white, working-class voters, probably helps the Republicans against the likely Democratic nominee.

The polls show that those voters have been with Clinton in the primaries, and she says that proves Obama is weakening among them. But she is talking about choices made in Democratic primaries, not between a Democratic nominee and a conservative Republican, Sen. John McCain, in the general election.

Clinton isn't through winning primaries. The dominance of white, older voters favors her in West Virginia, and she leads in Kentucky. Obama says he expects her to win in both states. His next realistic target is Oregon.

Another Clinton target is to win reinstatement of her tarnished primary victories in Florida and Michigan, where primaries were held in defiance of party schedule rules and the delegations were disallowed. Neither candidate campaigned there, and Obama wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan. The Democrats have to figure out a settlement for those two states, since barring their delegates from the national convention in Denver would invite punishment in the general election. The Clinton campaign demands all the delegates she would have won in those two primaries had they counted, and so far is balking at compromise.

Democratic rulemakers will consider the problem on May 31. That could settle it, or keep the whole hassle going.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Walter R. Mears reported on presidential campaigns from 1960 to 2004 for The Associated Press. He is retired now and lives in Chapel Hill, N.C.