Reason Hillary goes on- Washington Post

"Now, let me purge this formula of its gender implications. Let me suggest that pride, honor and a sort of unforgiving toughness are not male or female qualities. They are the qualities of leaders. It's hard to imagine Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir or Indira Gandhi doing a Tammy Wynette -- standin' by her man. They might well have done so, but the reason we have a difficult time picturing such a thing is that they had leadership qualities that, whether male or female, suggest otherwise.

Hillary Clinton is now exhibiting those leadership qualities. In rejecting the chorus of demands that she get out of the race, she is acting as any leader would. Take a tour of statues throughout the world, and, while you will find monuments to plenty of historical figures who lost battles, you will find none to "A Gracious Loser." As Vince Lombardi or Leo Durocher -- both famous for mythical statements about winning and losing -- could have told you, there is no such thing as a gracious loser. You lose hard. You lose tough. You lose only when you are beaten.

In the end, no one begrudges a bitter-ender. Robert E. Lee is not vilified because he fought on too long, wasting lives -- and all of it, mind you, in the cause of slavery. In Israel, Masada is venerated because the zealots held out and killed themselves rather than surrender. Thermopylae is not considered a defeat but a lesson to us all: Never give up!

This is precisely what Hillary Clinton is doing. She is staying in the race because losing comes soon enough, anyway, and life teaches that anything can happen. Sure, she's hurting the Democratic Party a bit, and, sure, she's inflicting some damage on Barack Obama. He will not only hear echoes of Clinton's attacks out of the mouth of John McCain, but on the Internet and elsewhere they will be recycled so that Clinton herself will be the attacker. Nothing dies on YouTube.

But in the end, when Obama is crowned king of the Democrats, Clinton will throw her arms around him and the music will swell and the crowds will cheer -- and everything will be forgotten. And when that happens, Hillary Clinton -- who will be only 65 in 2012 and four years after that still will be younger than McCain is now -- will be positioned to run for president, not as someone's wife, but as a gritty fighter who just would not quit."