What's Happening

See? I told you not to worry.

The two best articles I've read today about Senator Hillary Clinton's apparent failure to secure the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination are as follows.

Peter Keating in New York magazine explains, as one suspected, that Clinton's gas tax pander actually was her fatal overreach error, giving Senator Barack Obama the opening he needed to get the media off the Rev. Wright scandal by articulating a firm, tangible position and sealing her loss:

Opposing Clinton on a matter of substance got Obama off the defensive in the final days of the campaign and let him draw a new and sharp contrast without seeming negative. Opposing Clinton on this particular matter of substance finally gave Obama a chance to connect his “broken politics” theme to the concrete issue of energy independence, where he is on much firmer ground against the Clintons than on other economic issues, while simultaneously questioning Hillary’s honesty.

And he took full advantage. Six days ago, Obama introduced the single most brilliant ad of the Indiana campaign, called “Truth.” And, palpably relieved at the partial change of subject, he incorporated a detailed denunciation of the gas-tax suspension into his stump speech, in which he hit full stride again on Monday night.

And in response, Hillary doubled down, cranking out ads that said, “Barack Obama wants you to keep paying that tax.” Her campaign must have thought the issue was a winner. But it’s also true that her campaign just hasn’t been able to overcome its instinct for overkill. And voters noticed.

Betsy Reed, writing the cover story for The Nation is even more brutal in her surgically accurate analysis of how the Clinton campaign has attracted feminism but courted racism in "Race to the Bottom". She starts off listing all the horrific misogynist epithets cable news posers have slammed on her, but continues to build her argument through when Barack Obama became the first political figure to discuss race like an adult in years:

Obama initially responded to that challenge with his speech in Philadelphia on March 18. While condemning Wright's words, he placed them in a historical context of racial oppression and said, "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community." (More recently, of course, Obama did renounce him.) But in the Philadelphia speech, called "A More Perfect Union," Obama also outlined a racially universal definition of American citizenship and affirmed his commitment to represent all Americans as President. "I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together--unless we perfect our union by understanding that we have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction."

A mere three days after Obama spoke those words, Bill Clinton made this statement in North Carolina about a potential Clinton-McCain general election matchup: "I think it'd be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country. And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics." Whether or not this statement constituted McCarthyism, as one Obama surrogate alleged and as Clinton supporters vigorously denied, the timing of the remark made its meaning quite clear: controversies relating to Obama's race render him less fit than either Hillary or McCain to run for president as a patriotic American. A couple of weeks later, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen went so far as to call on Obama to make another speech, modeled after John F. Kennedy's declaration in 1960 that, despite his Catholicism, he would respect the separation of church and state as President--as though Obama's blackness were a sign of allegiance to some entity, like the Vatican, other than the United States of America.

Reed goes on to make the result of Clinton's nomination to be a defining moment for feminism -- old guard vs. new guard, the younger feminists with a more diverse political orientation -- and that Obama's appeal goes well beyond the issues:

Feminist Obama supporters of all ages and hues, meanwhile, are hoping that he comes out of this bruising primary with his style of politics intact. While he calls it "a new kind of politics," Clinton and Obama are actually very similar in their records and agendas (which is perhaps why this contest has fixated so obsessively on their gender and race). But in his rhetoric and his stance toward the world outside our borders, Obama does appear to offer a way out of the testosterone-addled GOP framework. As he said after losing Pennsylvania, "We can be a party that thinks the only way to look tough on national security is to talk, and act, and vote like George Bush and John McCain. We can use fear as a tactic and the threat of terrorism to scare up votes. Or we can decide that real strength is asking the tough questions before we send our troops to fight."

Here's the facts as they now stand for Hillary. She's crazy deep in the hole like she thinks she's a Rockefeller with her own money soaked into the campaign, still not paying all the outstanding vendor bills. Her peer supporters are starting to question her reason to keep running. Democrats are eager for change, and Barack Obama is proving himself, community organizer that he is, to be the real deal change agent. Per Matt Stoller in the prescient, "Obama's Consolidation of the Party," the five big things he is bringing to the party right on time:

1. Voter Registration
2. Obama Organizing Fellows
3. Money
4. Field
5. Message & Politics

It's all about the vision. It's all it's ever been. Like too many Democratic Presidential candidates before her, Hillary Clinton did not think to come into the election with a defined and resonant vision for where our country has to be in four or eight years. Any vision she's stitched together since "finding her voice" in New Hampshire has had something borrowed about it -- it's slogan. Yes She Can. Yes We Will. Si, sa puede.

Here's how Barack is doing in the mainstream media.

If I were able to buy stock in a sitting Governor, it would be Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.