Stop it with the fucking Obama bashing! Maybe we ought to face a couple of facts, Obama or Hillary or Edwards was never going to win a "landslide" win. Many of the people who disapprove of Bush when push comes to shove would have voted for him again if he was on the ballot in  2008 over the dem alternative because the GOP knows exactly what buttons to push to get their troops in line. If Hillary was the nominee can you imagine the ad about the sniper fire contrasted with Mccains pow hero stuff! This is and will always be a battle for every last vote to win, and if we don't out peform our turnout norms among black/young white voters Mccain is going to win. Generic dem always does better than the guy thats named once the attacks come so lets work our asses off and win the 51-48 race this time instead of whining about how obama should be blowing the old white guy out. 2 years ago who would have imagined anyone like Obama would even have a fucking chance now were wondering why it's not a cakewalk, please.

   His biggest lead ever in the daily tracking poll!
http://www.gallup.com/...

    Normally I don't put much stock in these daily movements but McCain's team seems to be really panicing. Perhaps their internals are as bad as this poll and they are worried Obama is on the verge of closing the sale and putting the straight talk express out of it's misery.

      I kind of like Rendell despite the fact that he can't sometime keep his mouth shut. Sometimes you need the guy that says what needs to be said and Rendell is a guy that does that.

http://thepage.time.com/

"Generally a lot of politicians don’t like to put somebody like that on the ticket. You know rule one for the Vice President is make sure you never upstage the President, right?... Hillary Clinton in some ways couldn’t help but upstage, even if she was trying not to."

    If Obama and his team conclude for whatever reason that he is far more likely to be elected president with her then he will pick her. I know it is not popular around here but I could live with it if I have to. I hope he does not have to pick her but we as Obama supporters do need a reality check that the popular vote and our party is split about 50/50. I wish it wasn't so and I wish Hillary had not run a shameful campaign filled with subtle plays on racial resentment and the like BUT Obama has to win. I think we should steel ourselves to the possability that Obama's campaign concludes that the "good" Hillary outweighs the bad. I know this isn't much of a diary but I think this point of view needs to be out there from an Obama diehard.

    Here's a few thoughts on electablity: would like to hear some reaction. This is not a polyanna Obama has it locked up diary, he has some problems BUT I think he will still win.

1. First and foremost Hillary can not beat McCain because to be blunt as James Clyburn put it most black people will take the way she would "win" personally. The media which loves her now because she's keeping the drama alive would immediately taint her as stealing the nomination from Obama with the help of insiders in smoke filled rooms that worked for husband. Millions of black/young Obama voters would converge on Denver to protest and plunge the party into civil war. The good thing is most supers know this so at the end of the day Obama will be the nominee EVEN if they think he will likely lose the general. To be brutally honest even if one buys the Hillary argument that Obama is unelectable one can not escape the fact that the way she would become the nominee would render her unelectable as well so in reality our safest choice is Obama. This does not mean he doesn't face major problems in the fall.

 Lets see we have one candidate in the race that has 58% of Americans believing that they are not honest and trustworthy. That candidate's only path to the nomination is proving that she's by far the more electable so that party bosses give the nomination to the candidate who is distrusted by the overwhelming majority of the population.

  To prove that the other candidate is not electable, the distrusted candidate becomes the stand in for the Republican candidate but the frontrunner can't really make the same case against the the desperate loser because he needs her voters in Novemeber or else the nomination is worthless. This is called political suicide and the idiots remaing nuetral are responsable for this. When one candidate's only motivation is to destroy the frontrunner while the frontrunner can't really fight back for fear of alienating the other supporters with his own "electability argument" this is what you get.

 So Evan Bayh is concern trolling about how the GOP will attack Obama.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...
"

I think it’s a real potential political problem and it’s something for superdelegates and voters to think about," said Bayh, who was made available to reporters by the Clinton campaign to speak about the controversy.

"The far right wing has a very good track record of using things like this relentlessly against our candidates, whether its Al Gore or John Kerry," Bayh said, "I’m afraid this is the kind of fodder they might use to harm him."

The popular Indiana senator said Republicans were able to tarnish Kerry’s war record and turn Gore into a "serial fibber," and predicted they will "use this to damage Barack, the Democratic party, and ultimately frustrate the change that we need in this country."

    The new CW is Hillary will have to win a "road game" to have any chance at swaying supers to overrule the pledged delegate leader. Tim Russert said on NBC NEWS tonight that BOTH campaigns think Hillary needs to win Indiana AND North Carolina as well as PA.

     Although I think the supers should probably end this now, I think a "fair deal" that is leaked to media would be that supers give her to May 6. At that point IF they she does not win both North Carolina and Indiana they collectively decide to call this thing. Many Hillary endorsers from the beginning are probably going through hell right now. They don't want to be disloyal to the Clintons but they know her only chance at becoming the nominee is total destruction of Barack Obama. In addition they know or have to know what the blowback would be from a Hillary super-delegate based win from the Obama supporters.

 Ezra Klein nails it. Did the Wright thing hurt Obama? for the general election, yes it did some damadge, that said it all but ends the fantasy of supers giving the nomination to Hillary. The reason being is that it would not be seen by anyone to about experience or ready on day 1, only RACE. No matter how damadged Obama may be because of this the party can simply not nominate him due to the fact that Obama's candidacy is now defined by this. For good or bad Obama has to be the nominee now, I think even some Clinton supporters will realize it.
http://www.prospect.org/...

To think through the political implications of the speech for a second, the real loser here looks to be Clinton. Now that Obama's candidacy is, in part, a referendum on the party's willingness to confront the issue of race and forge a cross-ethnic alliance in search of economic justice, it's hard to see how the supers can side with Clinton. Not because Obama is right in his quest, but because his candidacy is now too deeply intertwined with the history of the Democratic Party and the coalition that has evolved to support it.

        Granted this hasn't been the best news day for Obama but one significant comment has been overlooked that in the end may mean more to the end game on who the nominee is than any thing else.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/...

"If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what's happened in the elections," said Pelosi, "it would be harmful to the Democratic Party."

Although Pelosi offered her assessment without directly referencing Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., her comments lend considerable support to the Illinois Democrat.

      Game over. Hillary's ridiculous theory that carrying primaries in certain big states means anything has irrefutably been proven to be complete and total bullshit.

http://blogs.tnr.com/...

I'd love to see the crosstabs for this Pennsylvania poll, but, just looking at the top-line numbers, it strikes me as pretty good news for Obama. It's not so much that he's down three points in a hypothetical match-up with McCain, which is better than Hillary's six-point deficit but still not great. And it's certainly not that he's down 18 points to Hillary in the upcoming primary, which isn't going to impress anybody. It's the combination of the two: A poll showing that Obama can get blown out in the Pennsylvania primary and still hold his own there against McCain suggests working-class white Democrats simply prefer Hillary, not that they find something inherently objectionable about Obama, whom they're apparently happy to support in the general.

      That is to win the nomination because right now it sure doesn't look like it. The Obama people are playing the game according to the "rules" organizing voters, sending out memo's on their policy disagreements, and complaining about media coverage. Meanwhile the Clinton people are successfully savaging him in the spin game, it's got to the point where many are parroting the line that it's OK for party officials with deep ties to the Clintons to figure out away to nominate Hillary. So what does team Obama do they put out a memo on how Hillary will do anything to win. When I read that I wondered do these people still have no idea what they are up against? The Clintons are brilliantly setting this up to where Obama will have no choice but to either threaten to leave the party or watch Hillary take the nomination.

      I'm not the biggest fan of the toesucker but sometimes he does flat out nail it. This column is one of those occasions.
http://thehill.com/...

      The race is over.

The results are already clear. Obama will go to the Democratic Convention with a lead of between 100 and 200 elected delegates. The remaining question is: What will the superdelegates do then? But is that really a question? Will the leaders of the Democratic Party be complicit in its destruction? Will they really kindle a civil war by denying the nomination to the man who won the most elected delegates? No way. They well understand that to do so would be to throw away the party’s chances of victory and to stigmatize it among African-Americans and young people for the rest of their lives. The Democratic Party took 20 years to recover from the traumas of 1968 and it is not about to trigger a similar bloodletting this year.

      When it comes to organizing you guys are the best. When it comes to media spin you guys SUCK.  How the hell did you people allow this myth that Hillary carrying states like Ohio in a primary means he would have trouble winning the state in the general election. I haven't heard one reporter say the opposite that Hillary getting blown out in Iowa, Wisconson and Minn would get her beat in the general in those states. It's because the Clinton media team has the "A" people and you guys have the warm up squad. So please take some of our donations and get some people out there who can kick some ass on TV and in the spin room. Another thing what the fuck are you doing letting this Obama as veep stuff go on like this STOP SAYING IT'S FUCKING PREMATURE! Say under no circumstances would I expect to lose my delegate lead at at that time I expect to be the nominee. I will not even consider such a possablity because of that fact.

   Not my words, but those of the author of this absolutely must read article in The New Republic who nails exactly what Hillary is doing and why.

http://www.tnr.com/...

Clinton's path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results at the polls. The plan may also involve trying to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, after having explicitly agreed that the results would not count toward delegate totals. Oh, and her campaign has periodically hinted that some of Obama's elected delegates might break off and support her. I don't think she'd be in a position to defeat Hitler's dog in November, let alone a popular war hero.

     If you look at the map and the demographics of the remaining states it's clear that one state in particular has the makings of a Hillary blowout, West Virginia. To be blunt looking at the votes that have come in from parts of bordering states that are culturally similar, it's not going to be pretty. The good news though is Obama will have a few popular state political leaders to help make his case to Hillary's base. First Jay Rockefeller and now Nick Rahall.
http://www.cqpolitics.com/...

"The new voters he has brought to the process this year and the new direction, in my opinion, add up to what our country needs," Rahall said.

Obama has struggled to win the support of the type of working-class white voters who populate much of Rahall’s 3rd district in the southern portion of the state. In the Ohio primary on Tuesday, many of them backed Hillary Rodham Clinton , and Rahall acknowledged that his pick may be out of step with the leanings of the Democratic voters in his district."I recognize this may not be a popular decision in my district," he said. The district has the third‑lowest median income in the country.

Because he has to. What ever we think of her on here she has about half the party behind her till the end. The brutal reality of this race at this point is that it's momentum proof. It's simply a turnout battle being fought over very different demographics in various states. I despise Hillary but I don't despise most of her real world supporters. They are mostly loyal Democrats, mostly older/working class women who really look up to her. They don't provide the energy that Obama does to the party but they shouldn't be ignored either. We are at a point of no return in this thing, Hillary will win PA no matter how good a campaign Obama runs in the state on demographics alone. Obama will destroy her this week and run up huge margins in North Carolina and Oregon . No one is going to break through but Obama will have atleast a 100 vote pledged delegate lead at the end of this even if Fla and Mich revote.

http://thepage.time.com/      

   First the "picture" and now Harold Ickies comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson. In 8 days will these people finally go away?

Mentions his support for the former presidential candidate at breakfast event while calling Obama "a powerful spokesman" for the party.
"That’s one of the reasons I supported Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. I thought we needed a strong, powerful candidate, a black candidate, running for president."
B. Clinton came under fire before Obama’s South Carolina win for noting that Jackson won the state as well. Some felt the remark was inappropriate and racially-charged.