Wisconsin (Updates 1-2)

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.

Comments

[Guy Fawkes]

He's the frontrunner.

With all the benefits and drawbacks that implies.

Now I only have the newly-minted GOP attacks to feed my neuroses, since Clinton & Clinton are pretty much paper tigers by now. The sooner they drop out, the better it will be for Obama and for them (oh, and of course "The Party" too).