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Finding the ExitThe moment presidential candidates know it's time to go.

By John DickersonPosted Saturday, April 5, 2008, at 7:11 AM ET

John Dickerson chatted online with readers about this article. Read the transcript.

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Candidates who think they are fighting for a cause, like Teddy Kennedy in 1980 and Ronald Reagan in 1976, won't get out of the race early because they are convinced that they are fighting for bedrock principles—the very principles that attracted them to politics!—and not their private ambitions. Clinton has been promising voters she'll fight for them; with her own struggle to survive, she has won (as it were) the chance to show people just what kind of fighter she is. So it was probably inevitable that, in Philadelphia last Tuesday, she would compare herself to the town's fictional boxing hero: "Could you imagine if Rocky Balboa had gotten halfway up those art museum steps and said, 'Well, I guess that's about far enough'? Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing the fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit."*

So call it the Rocky syndrome—the just-before-the-end affliction that strikes losing candidates. They all go through a punchy period in which, no matter what the odds, they come to believe that they can pull out a victory with a roundhouse before the final bell. "You can convince yourself of anything," says Beckel. "I was convinced with a couple more weeks that Mondale could have beat Reagan. How nuts is that?"

To make matters harder, there are plenty of real-life political comebacks that candidates can act out in their hotel rooms at night to comfort themselves. Remember that "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline, they can tell themselves. John Kerry rescued his doomed 2004 campaign with a surprise win over Howard Dean in Iowa. Ronald Reagan looked as though he was in deep trouble when he fired his campaign manager late in his 1980 campaign. Sen. John McCain, left for dead last year, may be one of the best Lazarus stories of all. And there may yet be one more. "If Hillary Clinton wins the nomination," says Trippi, "no candidate will ever want to get out."

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.

Correction, April 7, 2008: In the original version of this article, the Clinton quotation ended with the candidate saying, "I never give up," which was as it was reported in a number of contemporaneous accounts of the event. An audio recording suggests Clinton misspoke and said, "I never get up." The four words in question have been deleted. (Return to the corrected sentence.)