I would love to be a fly on the wall of the Clinton Campaign Office

Just to pick up some new cuss words... Heh. From the Washington Post:

Clinton Washed Away in Trickle of Delegates to Obama
Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer got up early yesterday. "Today, Michigan superdelegate Joyce Lalonde endorsed Barack Obama," he wrote in an e-mail at 6:56 a.m.

This raised an interesting question: Joyce who? But the real news came in the next paragraph: "Obama needs 41 delegates to secure the Democratic nomination."

It was the beginning of a day-long water torture for Hillary Clinton and her campaign, as Obama aimed, by day's end, to reach the 2,118 delegates needed to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination -- with a combination of superdelegates and regular delegates from the last two states to hold a Democratic vote, South Dakota and Montana.

The Houston Chronicle has a nice step-by-step chronology of events:

What went wrong for Hillary Clinton
On Dec. 5, the Chicago Tribune, Barack Obama's hometown paper, reported that new polling showing Hillary Rodham Clinton far ahead of the Illinois senator in the key swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania made her nomination look "inevitable."

The Tribune's "Swamp" blog declared that "the conclusion drawn by the polling experts appears to be: Forget about Iowa being close, Clinton's inevitable, she's going to be the Democratic nominee."

A funny thing happened on the way to the coronation. A charismatic young upstart with soaring rhetoric and a compelling life story became the Democrats' candidate of destiny, and December's inevitable nominee became the eventual loser.

"We haven't seen something this big go down since the Titanic," said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College. "This is an epic of mistakes and misallocation of resources."

A couple of the observations:

Mistakenly planned for knockout
Because of her record-breaking early fundraising and the front-loaded primary schedule, Clinton and her top strategists thought that they would have the nomination wrapped up by Super Tuesday, Feb. 5. She said as much when she appeared on ABC's This Week on Dec. 30, 2007.

"I'm in it for the long run," she told host George Stephanopoulos. "It's not a very long run. It'll be over by Feb. 5."

The result was a colossal miscalculation: Clinton spent every penny she had raised by Super Tuesday. She had little organization in the states that followed and was outspent by more than 4-to-1 by Obama. He won 11 contests in a row, most of them caucuses, and Clinton never caught up.

And:

Too little, too late
Clinton didn't settle on a successful political "persona" � the working-class battler � until late in the campaign. By then it was too late to overcome the delegate edge Obama built in February. "Sybil had only 15 personalities," said Zogby. "There were too many different Hillarys in too many states � and many did not seem genuine." When Clinton finally found an approach that worked, it was too late.

And one more:

Bill Clinton impact
His controversial comments convinced people that it was time for an end to the Clinton-Bush dual dynasty. Democrats strongly approve of Bill Clinton's job performance but they also strongly want change. After seven consecutive presidential elections featuring a Clinton or a Bush on the ballot, many Democrats are looking for a fresh face.

Some of the comments to this article are priceless:

What went wrong for Hillary Clinton?

I think that she was incapable of hiding the fact that she's a lying, manipulative, power hungry monster that makes other politicians seem honest, safe, and trustworthy for a long enough period of time to get more votes in the primaries than Obama. In her defense I have to add that it's doubtful that anyone could have concealed that many character flaws long enough to get the nomination. If she hadn't been married to a former president during his two terms she probably wouldn't have made it past super tuesday.

Don't let the door hit you on your way out of Washington...