Should she? Or shouldn't she quit?

I don't think she should quit and niether does Mr. Shrum

Robert Shrum NY Times
From Barack Obama’s side, this would mean no more suggestions, even in the guise of counterattacks, that Mrs. Clinton’s role in the White House was "ceremonial," when she was in fact her husband’s most influential adviser; no more memos criticizing her "character gap"; and no more distorted readings of her health care plan that assert it would force people to buy insurance they can’t afford.
From Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, there should be no more sly comments about who is qualified to be commander in chief that just happen to include John McCain and exclude Mr. Obama; no more calls to superdelegates that traffic in dark warnings about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.; and no more silly, and false, charges that Mr. Obama wasn’t a "professor" at the University of Chicago law school, a transparent ploy that failed to stem the fallout after Mrs. Clinton "misspoke" about her trip to Bosnia as first lady.
The degree of aggression on each side may not be comparable, as both sides argue on their own behalf. But the Democratic nomination may not be worth winning if the victor is lacerated as unready, unfit to hold the office, or un-American — not, as expected, by the vast right-wing conspiracy but by a Democratic rival.
I don’t doubt that Mr. Obama would agree to these rules of the road. He is winning, after all. His summons to change has proved more compelling than Mrs. Clinton’s argument for experience. So wouldn’t a truce be asymmetrical? Without attacking, how could she possibly catch up? That’s why the Clinton operatives turned to what they call a "kitchen sink" strategy.
But the negative campaign apparently damages her more than Mr. Obama. Fairly or unfairly, she is blamed for it. In a recent poll, her approval rating collapsed to 37 percent. No one can be elected with that rating, undoing her rationale that she would be a stronger candidate against John McCain.
Yet Mrs. Clinton has another, if decidedly narrow, path to the nomination. She has shifted from the cautious, triangulating approach that converted her inevitability into improbability. Now she sounds a populism that recalls Bill Clinton’s 1992 pledge to "put people first."
Pennsylvania, the next test, is both ideal ground for this message and a demographic nightmare for Mr. Obama. She should win the state by double digits — and she has to. Then she would need to upend expectations by winning North Carolina on May 6, and then roll up big margins in the remaining states — from West Virginia and Nebraska on May 13 to Montana and South Dakota on June 3, the campaign’s last day of voting.
This is a tall order. If she cannot fill it, Mrs. Clinton should then decide it’s time for her to go.
If instead she insists on protracting the race, calls in June for her to quit would be right in principle and right for the party. But we are not at that stage yet. Calls for her to concede now, before the race is lost, are premature.
Obviously, if she cannot win the nomination between now and June 3, Mrs. Clinton could push on to the convention as Ronald Reagan did in 1976 against Gerald Ford and as Ted Kennedy did four years later against Jimmy Carter. But in ’76 and ’80, there were great issues of ideology and policy at stake: Mr. Reagan’s demand for the end of détente with the Soviets, Mr. Kennedy’s demand for national health insurance and a new economic program.
Mrs. Clinton’s preference for an individual mandate on health care, one of the few policy disagreements between the candidates this year, hardly rises to that level. If she carried a lost campaign all the way to the convention, she would be driven not by a cause but by personal disappointment and thwarted ambition.
Convention fights don’t necessarily produce defeat in the fall. But for Democrats in 2008, this race now looks close, closer than we assumed before the resurrection of John McCain with his appeal to moderates and independents. Democrats cannot afford to fight on after June 3, when the outcome will be clear.
If defeat comes for Hillary Clinton, it will be hard for her to face. At the start, she thought the nomination was hers. She could have been the candidate of change instead of the establishment candidate in a year of change. She might have swept the primaries in spite of Mr. Obama’s extraordinary talents.
But that was the year that wasn’t. And, in the likely event that she falls short by June, I hope and believe that no matter how hard it is, she will do the right thing.
Robert Shrum, a senior fellow at the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University and the author of "No Excuses," was a senior adviser to Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000 and John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004.
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Damon Winter/The New York Times
Mr. Obama, with the MSNBC host Chris Matthews this week in Pennsylvania, has lately lost ground with men, a survey finds.
The survey suggests that Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, may have been at something of a peak in February, propelled by a string of primary and caucus victories over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, and that perceptions of him are settling down.
Mr. Obama’s favorability rating among Democratic primary voters has dropped seven percentage points, to 62 percent, since the last Times/CBS News survey, in late February. While that figure is by any measure high, the decline came in a month during which he endured withering attacks from Mrs. Clinton and responded to reports that his former pastor had made politically inflammatory statements from his church’s pulpit in Chicago.
Still, the events of the last month do not appear to have fundamentally altered the race for the party’s nomination or provided what Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has been seeking: evidence of a collapse in Mr. Obama’s standing or an overwhelming preference voiced for Mrs. Clinton by Democratic voters in polls, developments that could be used to persuade uncommitted superdelegates to sign on with her.
The poll showed that Mr. Obama now leads Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, 47 percent to 42 percent; his lead was 50 percent to 38 percent in late February, when Mr. McCain still faced primary opposition from Mike Huckabee. The latest poll shows Mrs. Clinton leading Mr. McCain, 48 percent to 43 percent, in a similar match-up.