Finding the Exit-The moment presidential candidates know it's time to go.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2188192/pagenum/all/#page_start

Finding the Exit-The moment presidential candidates know it's time to go.
By John Dickerson


At some point in the next weeks or months, either Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama is going to face a lonely moment. Standing at the bathroom sink with a toothbrush or huddling with aides at campaign headquarters or collapsed on a couch at home with his or her spouse, one of them will decide that it's over.

This will happen—honest. The campaign may seem interminable, but at some point, it's going to end. The voters will cast ballots, and the superdelegates will scheme, but for Clinton (or, less likely for the moment, Obama), the contest will come down to this simple, stark moment of recognition.

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Perhaps the greatest impediment to clear thinking for a doomed candidate is simply that endurance in the face of doom is a key political trait—probably one crucial to their success in life so far. Toughness and endurance were, in fact, the only ideas the McCain team had left during its bleakest period. "I have a very complicated strategy for you," adviser Charles Black says he told McCain as they tried to decide whether the senator could stay in after his staff, money, and lead in the polls had all disappeared. "Stay in the race until you're the last man standing."

For Clinton, who has endured smears, sneers, calls for her head, and a thousand editorial cartoons, this armor has sustained her throughout her career. "If you have scar tissue, then you know what it's like to be beat up, and you can go through it rather easily," says Coelho. "There's no doubt that Hillary Clinton has scar tissue, which makes her immune to many of the attacks coming her way. When people call for her to get out, they are not appealing to her intellect; they are appealing to her scar tissue, and for her that means fight on."

Candidates without a thick hide often grow one simply by going through the brutal campaign process. To have any success at all, they must become immune to the very forces that ultimately might signal that they need to drop out. Once they've bought into the process, the end-stage indignities—audiences of only a few dozen, the disappearance of your once-chummy campaign surrogates—are hard to recognize.

In the end, Clinton (or perhaps Obama) will likely call it quits when she (or he) decides, in a dark night of the soul, that continuing will permanently harm her (or his) political future. Then they will begin the long process of comforting disappointed supporters, watching the cameras disappear, and hearing the endless analyses of their political demise. They will feel, in some ways, as though they're attending their own wake. Then perhaps they'll have another solitary realization: The way they handle their exit from one presidential campaign might be the first step in building the case for the next one.

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