I think this has been a good week for Obama. We knew the race question was going to come up in a more explicit way than the innuendo strategy promoted by the Clintons; it was just a question of when. And it was also a question of how Obama would respond. It’s hard to think that he could have handled it any better. And the polling at the end of the week seems to bear out the hope that most Americans would see it that way.
That impenetrable thirty percent on the far right will never be swayed; the question, as always, is what the thirty percent in the middle is thinking. There are some in that middle group, including Democrats, that still lean more right than left on questions of race, but I think the shift among Democrats, toward Obama, if it wasn’t already, is now clearly evident. Two events yesterday mark it.
The first was the Richardson endorsement and the second is the Allen and Vanderhei Politico article getting a lot of attention in which the writers point out the obvious: that Clinton cannot win. So what if she wins PA; she still can’t win the nomination without the superdelegates. No one in the media wants to say it, and Obama supporters don’t want to say it for fear of jinxing it, but the superdelegates simply are not going to give it to Clinton. If anything, after Richardson, they might now give it to Obama to put an end to this madness.
That’s maybe too much to hope for, but the superdelegates’ ability to end it now, it seems to me, would be the main benefit of having superdelegates. If they have any doubts about Obama, they should be dispelled after that speech. This guy is more presidential than any Democrat, including the Clintons and Gore, in the last half century. Richardson is right: he’s got something special: real leadership capabilities rather than being the typical game-playing political hack. And the superdelegates can put an end to the Clintons’ desperate efforts to do anything they can to make us think otherwise.
P.S. The psychology in the media regarding Clinton’s strength is oddly persistent. Yesterday on NPR I heard the newsreader talk about Clinton’s win in Texas. It’s as if the presumption of a Clinton victory has been so deeply ingrained in our national consciousness that we cannot bring ourselves to believe that she has lost even when she has. But the Allen/Vanderhei article might break the spell. I hope so.
P.P.S. Josh Marshal thinks along the same lines here: "I wonder whether the collapse of the revote negotiations, the revelation that the campaign is in debt and the Richardson endorsement together are collectively forcing a moment of realization."
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