It's not over til the fat lady sings and that hasn't happened yet for the Democratic nomination.  Yes, fatty may be warming up in the wings, but the final notes have not been sung. Until the race is really over, Hillary Clinton has every right to hang in there and keep her campaign alive -- even taking it to the convention. After all, that's what conventions are for -- to count the delegates and determine the nominee.   

The media, Democratic party bosses and Obama supporters have for weeks been calling for Clinton  to "graciously" concede -- even as she continues to win more primaries than Barack Obama and by bigger margins, such as in Puerto Rico Sunday where she won two-thirds of the vote.

Meanwhile, the media and the party long ago adopted Obama's message that he is, in fact, the nominee.  He has kissed her off and that message was a strategic move for him, which has been bought by party leaders and most of the media.  On Tuesday night, after the final two primaries, he will declare victory, whether he has the necessary number or delegates or not.

It reminds me of when the networks prematurely declared George W. Bush the winner of Florida in 2000, and therefore the nominee.  When the outcome in Florida then was called into question, many people still believed that Bush had won Florida in the first place and the U.S. Supreme Court simply affirmed that.

Now, with only two primaries remaining on Tuesday-- South Dakota and Montana with only 31 delegates at stake -- Clinton has scheduled her final "victory party" in New York.  In typical fashion of the reporting over the last few weeks, Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC Monday asked senior Clinton advisor Harold Ickes if that means she's going to announce the end of her campaign in her home state.

TV reporters are consumed with the question of when Clinton will throw in the towel.  ABC's George Stephanopoulos has speculated it may be Wednesday and surely will be by the end of the week.

Barack Obama does not yet have enough delegates to be awarded the nomination. According to NBC's count, he needs 42 more delegates and Clinton needs 198.  Since the Florida-Michigan decision, Obama has picked up five superdelegates and Clinton has gotten two.

Ickes told MSNBC Monday, "We do not believe that by midnight tomorrow that either candidate will have the new magic number." The new number, based on the addition of Michigan and Florida delegates at half strength, is 2,118.

Clinton has suggested she may challenge the Democratic National Committee's new number, based on the decision over the weekend on Florida and Michigan.  Ickes has raised a legitimate question regarding why the delegate strength from Michigan's uncommitted votes were arbitrarily assigned to Obama, who had taken his name off the Michigan ballot.

Clinton also is still trying to attract uncommitted superdelegates and convince supers who have announced for Obama to change their minds, arguing that she has proved she is a stronger candidate in the general election by virtue of the states she has won and the varied constituencies that support her.  By her calculations, she has won a majority of the popular vote.  Super delegates are not pledged and have until the convention to decide which candidate they support.  Some supers have switched back and forth.

Here's the bottom line.  The purpose of national conventions is to select the party nominee.  In recent years, since the era of media politics began, parties have been anxious to determine the nominee beforehand and turn the conventions into a PR push, a promotional show, for the ticket. Parties have forgotten that conventions were once the place where serious business was conducted, from determining the nominee to adopting platforms that were actually debated and rules for the next contest.

This is the closest race for the nomination in decades.  It's even closer than 1976 when Ronald Reagan hired James Baker to be his "delegate counter" and pursued his goal of picking off still uncommitted and Gerald Ford delegates and taking his pursuit of the nomination to the national convention.  It didn't work, but he had every right to do it.

Same can be said for Hillary Clinton.  She has run an admirable campaign and fought long and hard.  Democrats want it over with so that there are no fireworks, hurt feelings and divisions after the convention.  Nice idea, but that's not the way the system is supposed to work.

Hillary Clinton has every right to take her campaign to the convention -- still 2 1/2 months away. And she should do so.

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