Stick a fork in the Clintons:

Hillary Rodham Clinton will concede Tuesday night that Barack Obama has the delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, campaign officials said, effectively ending her bid to be the nation’s first female president.

Obama is 40 delegates shy of clinching the nomination, but he is widely expected to make up the difference Tuesday with superdelegate support and votes in South Dakota and Montana. Once he reaches the magic number of 2,118, Clinton will acknowledge that he has secured the necessary delegates to be the nominee.

The former first lady will stop short of formally suspending or ending her race in her speech in New York City.

She will pledge to continue to speak out on issues like health care. But for all intents and purposes, the two senior officials said, the campaign is over.

Very interesting/perceptive piece by Josh Marshall yesterday, specifically referring to Bill Clinton’s response to the Vanity Fair piece, and how - and this is a small but telling thing - the former president refers to the YouTube video of Rev. Pfleger attacking Hillary as “the movie”:

In a sense, of course, this is just a triviality of word choice; he’s a little out of touch with the lingo. But for me — maybe just the personal prism through which I see the drama — it communicates the larger truth: that Bill is a man out of his time, out of his element, which is something painful to watch and must be a unique agony for him to experience.

Bill Clinton was on so many levels the master of the politics of the 1980s and 1990s, the magic with words and connection with people, intuitively sizing up the tempo and undercurrents of the political moment. Hate him or love him, I think anybody with a feel for politics knew this. And I loved him.

I don’t mean to write his epitaph. He’s obviously got the same shrewdness and political canniness on many levels. But again and again through this cycle, in little ways and big, he’s shown he’s not quite in sync with this political era, doesn’t quite grasp the new mechanics — both the ideological texture and the nuts and bolts of the networked news cycle. Attacks have backfired. And while Clinton’s emotions and impulsiveness have always been key to his character and political sensibility, whereas in the past it was him riding the tiger of his outsized personality and passions, now it’s the tiger riding him.

The political master, Marshall writes, just out of touch with the moment. And I think that’s probably true - not just of Bill, but of Hillary as well.

Update: OK, maybe not:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is “absolutely not” planning to concede the campaign to Barack Obama on Tuesday night, Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe told CNN on Tuesday.

“No one has the number to be the nominee of the Democratic party right now,” he said.

McAuliffe, asked about an AP report that Clinton will acknowledge Tuesday night after the South Dakota and Montana primaries that Obama has the delegates to clinch the nomination for the November presidential election, replied: “They are 100 percent incorrect.”

As noted yesterday - I will be extremely curious to hear the rationale behind why she keeps hanging on, why she won’t - can’t - admit defeat. But I suspect it’s specifically because the Clinton’s don’t want to admit that they’re just out of touch with the moment. So long as she keeps on keeping on, she doesn’t have to face up to it.