Obama continues to exceed expectations. There was talk over the
weekend of a Clinton win or at least closiing the gap to within 5%.
It’s looking at this point to be a 12-15 17 point loss.
There seems to be a 60/40 pattern locking in here. I don’t know that
Obama will take Texas by double digits, but I’d be surprised if he
loses. He may lose in Ohio, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he wins. In
both states we can be sure that he will exceed expectations.
Clinton is looking the part of the loser. It was symbolized in the
way that all the networks switched to Obama’s speech in Houston in the
middle of Clinton’s in Youngstown. It was clear in the way Obama was
looking ahead in his speech with hardly even a nod in Clinton’s
direction. It’s feeling very much that it is over.
Tell me if I"m wrong, because it’s not like I listen to every word,
but in Obama’s speech tonight I heard for the first time a promise to
close Guantanamo, restore habeas corpus, and end torture. Maybe I’ve
missed it, but I’ve not heard these issues come up in the debates, nor
have I heard them coming up in the stump speeches. And it was good to
hear that someone is concerned enough about the erosion of the rule of
law to mention it in a rally speech.
It’s clear that Obama understands that the enemy isn’t rank-and-file
Republicans, but the big-money lobbyists and the Democrats and
Republicans who are complicit in the K-Street system. Exactly. I don’t
know if he can do anything about it, but he’s framing the problem
correctly, and I think he correctly understands the only way those
interests can be defeated: by a broad, energized consensus of Americans
who will not put up with it anymore.
He speaks like a subsidiarist when he says that he’s not for
government doing for people what they can do for themselves, but
recognizes that when things get out of balance the only fix is the
power of government working for the broad public interest. He’s someone
whose experience in community organizing has helped him to understand
that change comes from the bottom up, and cannot be imposed from top
down.
According to Chuck Todd on MSNBC, Obama’s pledged delegate lead is
over 150 now. Clinton needs to get 58% of the delegates in the
remaining contests to pull even, and she’s not going to be close. Obama
needs 65% of the the remaining contests to get over 2025 in just
pledged delegates, but he needs less than 50% of the remaining
superdelegates to get to that number.
So next it’s the debates. Expect the attack to be on Obama’s
commander-in-chief qualifications and Obama’s legislative
accomplishments in the senate. That’s a weak point for , but I’m not
sure Hillary has much to match it with. Both seem to talk more about
things they’ve done before their relatively short senate careers began.
UPDATE 1: When it’s bad, it’s bad. The Clinton campaign is now on the defensive about the plagiarism accusation?
If Obama’s campaign can turn that mistake into a positive, there’s no
stopping it. Obama has Reaganesque teflon. Will yesterday be looked at
in retrospect as the day the dam broke?
UPDATE 2: I think that when we start our retrospectives, South
Carolina will also be seen as a critical turning point. At that
juncture, the race/gender divide seemed to be the most important
factor. I was wrong in my thinking then that the Clinton strategy of
trying to make Obama look like the Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton
candidate would be more effective than it was. I think it could be said
fairly that it backfired in a way that changed the course of the
campaign. It played into a sub-narrative that the Clintons will do
anything to win, and in a curious way it inoculated Obama from further
Clinton attacks: "That’s just the Clintons doing their politically
calculated thing." That’s how the plagiarism attack is playing now.
It will be interesting to see if Obama is inoculated from attacks
from the Republicans in a similar way. It could be that the country is
just sick and tired of that kind of thing, and it just won’t work
anymore. Or if it is going to work, there will have to be a new viral
strain that the GOP will have developed for which there is no prepared
defense.
But as I wrote in an earlier post, certain candidates seem more
vulnerable to branding by the opposition. Dukakis, Gore in 2000, and
Kerry were blank screens onto which the opposition effectively
projected their movie. Candidates like Reagan, B. Clinton, and Obama
radiate their own light and the movie their opponents want to project
onto them was or is simply obscured by their inner glow.
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