First, Clinton, D-N.Y., personally and single-handedly torpedoed what had been excellent prospects for becoming Sen. Barack Obama's running mate on a Democratic dream ticket by her bizarre, and even appalling, allusions to the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy 40 years ago. Critics angrily pointed out that her remarks could be taken as incitement for extremists to try to shoot Sen. Obama, D-Ill., the clear front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in Denver this August.

Second, a new Field Poll shows Clinton falling well behind Obama even in California, a state where she handily beat him in the Democratic primary and which had been regarded as a secure base for her. Clinton won California by 9 points on Feb. 5. But the new poll, conducted among 914 Democrats May 16-27, shows Obama with 51 percent to her 38 percent, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday.

Third, two superdelegates from the giant state of Texas -- where, again, Clinton won the primary contest, have come out for Obama. Texas Democratic State Party Chairman Boyd Ritchie and his wife, Betty, a member of the Democratic National Committee, have both declared for Obama.

Since the superdelegates were expressly given a key decision-making role in the Democratic presidential nominee selection process, this is especially ominous for Clinton.

Fourth, the two top Democrats in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, both weighed in this week saying that the party had to fall in behind its choice quickly. Reid said that the campaign had to end within the next two weeks. That has to mean unifying behind Obama, who is now more than 200 delegates ahead of Clinton, a gap she cannot hope to close.

Democrats are haunted by the fear that Clinton will carry her fight to the party's national convention and undermine Obama. Whenever party presidential nominees, even incumbent presidents like Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980 or George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992 are undermined or overshadowed by bitter party rivals at their nominating conventions, they almost always go on to lose in the presidential election in November.

There was a straw of good news blowing in the wind for Clinton against the hurricane of bad news and even worse personal decisions that have engulfed her. The Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, the largest newspaper in South Dakota, endorsed her Friday for Tuesday's primary in the state, which she is expected to win.

So on balance, Clinton can count a gain this week in South Dakota. But it doesn't count much against her catastrophic setbacks in California, Texas and Michigan and the opposition of the leaders of her party in the House and Senate.

As we have noted previously in these columns, Clinton clearly bested Obama in the Democratic popular vote in most of the big states, including the three most populous ones -- California, Texas and New York -- in key Democratic strongholds like West Virginia and Kentucky, and crucial Northeast and Midwest industrial states that will decide the election, like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Yet despite all of these, thanks to a campaign that will go down in history for its utter ineptitude, she is now virtually certain to lose.

Clinton let the Obama campaign sweep her in virtually every caucus across the country. She paid scant regard to primaries in small states, allowing Obama to build up massive momentum and a solid base in the Democratic popular vote that came to offset her wins in big states.

Her first campaign chief, her old friend Patti Solis Doyle, proved utterly unable to do the job, and her campaign headquarters was paralyzed by factions and infighting to the point that it could hardly function at all. All these bungles ripped to shreds Clinton's most important and most often claimed qualification for the presidency, that she had more experience in policymaking and government at the highest level than anyone else in the campaign.

Clinton also appeared a hopelessly outdated 1960s ideologue with her obsession with feminism. Ironically, the comfortably middle-class Yale law graduate who has lived her entire adult life in elite circles was forced to portray herself as an underdog champion of the dispossessed. That at least gained her some traction among working-class Democrats. But it came too late to offset her endless list of wrong political and managerial decisions.

Clinton could still have had a soft landing, magnanimously making her peace with Obama and agreeing to take the vice presidential spot on his ticket in return for healing the wounds of the campaign that set feminists against blacks, and working-class Dems against the college students and intellectuals who rallied to Obama. But her RFK comments torpedoed even that.

Earlier in this race, we predicted that Clinton would turn into a ghostly Flying Dutchwoman, endlessly sailing the seas of the Democratic Party's primaries and caucuses, until hell froze over. It has come to pass. And unless she changes her conduct and way of looking at the world, even after her bizarre Calvary of a campaign is done, she will continue to be trapped in it in her own mind, doomed to never know rest or peace.