Fourth Quarter?

There's a diarist on Kos named ipsos who thinks Barack Obama crossed a line tonight:

He's no longer running for the Democratic nomination for president. He's running for president, period - and even John McCain knows it, with the addition of his lines about "platitudes" to his speech tonight. (And what a hell of a contrast between the tens of thousands of people of all ages and colors at the Obama rally and the little crowd of old white people, including the exhumed corpse of John Warner, in suits behind McCain a few minutes later!)

John McCain ended his speech poking fun at Obama's "fired up and ready to go" line. But he looked tired out and ready to go...to bed.

Obama simply crushed her, DC at 75%, MD at 60% and VA at 64%. Sure, TX, OH and PA look more fertile for her, but he's now the frontrunner, he's pretty credibly making his case, and people are still flocking to him -- with donors melting his servers tonight.

Will she be able to put together the necessary 60% wins from hereon out to beat him in the popular delegate count? Will she manage to stay maybe only 30 or 40 popularly elected delegates behind him and also pull in enough superdelegates willing to commit political party suicide?

Is her staff shake-up finished with another one tonight, buried as best as possible in the triple landslide loss? Will the inside story of how un-Presidentially she's mismanaged her own campaign grow to even the size of Giuliani's city-paid mistress escort service?

The fact is that she's posting numbers that might have sustained a John Edwards campaign, but for a presumptive frontrunner just looks like inability to deliver. Obama's been winning for the past eight days, starting with his delegate edge last Super Tuesday, through the clobberings on Saturday and Sunday, to today. Winning by convincing her target constituency to vote for him instead. White males, Latinos, women. Doing what candidates have to do, here and in the General Election: build winning coalitions.

I've mentioned the Obama as a basketball team leader before. I've talked to friends about my suspicion that he purposefully drew the foul(s) from Bill Clinton by (correctly) denigrating the effectiveness of his Presidential legacy compared to Ronald Reagan. If you look at the nomination battle as a game, then the First Quarter ended after New Hampshire, the Second after South Carolina, and we may have just finished the Third.

No, it doesn't go to the Convention, he'll be the Party Leader by then. Obama's always been several steps ahead in the game, much deeper strategy than any of his Democratic opponents, and one based on excellent command of fundamentals, always an edge in sports. He's set the pace of the game repeatedly, whether forcing Clinton to up her tone by his own example and try to steal his rhetoric, or even John McCain, pathetically unoriginal, co-opting his signature "Fired up/Ready to go" phrase.

You know, from both Clinton and McCain, the sincerest form of flattery.

So is this endgame time? Is Obama going to close the deal between now and poll closing on March 4th?

His speech tonight is strong on framing his idea of hope, one you work to earn payoff on, and here's the whole video. Below is the excerpt reel, not as fun as the whole thing, but shorter:



It may not be a done deal, but it sure is looking appealing.