Unless Hillary and her tribe's delusions somehow shake Barack's so far unshakable foundations all the ten point big state/low information voter "blow-outs" (if 10 points, a 50% Obama cutdown from her 20 point PA polling start a month or so ago, can be called a blow-out compared to his 25-35% wins all throughout this Primary Season) are over. His strategy of tightening the gap and forcing her to spend her campaign dry has succeeded.
She's net maybe 11 pledged delegates. After all that. And in North Carolina, he'll more than erase the gain.
So that's the good news, and if you're an Obama supporter you just have to stand the suspense. He will always be the underdog, until he runs for his second term, because as a 1/2 black American of 47 years old he will always trail Hillary Clinton and John McCain in name recognition and media familiarity. It takes awhile for most folks to like something new, especially with as critical civic decision as who will be the next leader of the free world, to be comfortable enough to choose it.
The New York Times, which endorsed Clinton back when New York state had it's Primary, is finished with her in an editorial entitled, "The Low Road to Victory":
On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.
If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”
By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues like terrorism, the economy and how to organize an orderly exit from Iraq, Mrs. Clinton does more than just turn off voters who don’t like negative campaigning. She undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be president than Mr. Obama.
It goes on to call on the superdelegates to end it. As Andrew Sullivan says in "The Worst Of All Worlds For The Dems", the fault isn't just Hillary, it's the "Clinton Democrats" as an organization or possibly even a voting bloc:
If Obama thinks he has a right to actually be nominated by the Clinton Democrats because he has won more votes, more states and more delegates, he is sadly mistaken. They will never let such a person win without a death struggle. And that is where the Democrats are now headed.
I hope Andrew is wrong. I hope it won't be racist Democrats sinking Obama's nomination or, worse, his election in the Fall. I think Obama didn't break 9 points partially because he was so honest, not doling out that customary urban bribery in Philly called "walking around money." He didn't twist her words or seize the opening provided by the since ridiculed hosts of the last debate. It's always harder to win fair.
Here's part of the word from the Obama campaign, "A fundamentally unchanged race":
Tonight, Hillary Clinton lost her last, best chance to make significant inroads in the pledged delegate count.
The only surprising result from Pennsylvania is that in a state considered tailor-made for Hillary Clinton that she was expected to win, Barack Obama was able to improve his standing among key voter groups since the Ohio primary. For example, among white voters, Obama narrowed the gap with Clinton by six points. Among voters over 60, he nearly cut the gap in half, from 41 points to 24 points. And Independent voters – the group that will decide the general election and a group Obama is particularly strong with – were not able to vote in Not surprisingly, she led by as much as 25 points in the weeks leading up to the election.
I'll close with his speech, already looking ahead, from Evansville, Indiana. The guy is undiminished -- if anything, re-energized to have put PA behind him, behind us all. I'd show you Hillary's victory speech, but I have difficulty watching her now, with her markedly different emphasis on herself and, most tellingly, her appropriation of his campaign slogans, her semiotic thievery, something you never hear Barack do.
It tells me something about her, about her lack of originality. When I think of her in the last debate, with the evil answers ready, waiting to be deployed as rehearsed, the Rovian buzzwords and bold fearmongering, and compare it to his thoughtfulness, his taking the questioners to task for perpetuating their conspiratorial fraud, I wonder if they really are of equal minds.
Obama is the original. He's got a rock-solid Constitutional Law mind. He knows who he is, and he's better at finding the crux of a problem and moving the ball in the right direction.
She's even learned Internet fundraising from him. Her motto tonight may be that she gets knocked down but she picks herself back up, but I'm wondering why I would want a President dependent on second chances.
There are few mulligans as leader of the United States of America.
I want this guy teeing off for our team.
No comments:
Post a Comment