Wilting Over Waffles

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 23, 2008
He’s never going to shake her off.

The very fact that he can’t shake her off has become her best argument against him. “Why can’t he close the deal?” Hillary taunted at a polling place on Tuesday.

She’s been running ads about it, suggesting he doesn’t have “what it takes” to run the country. Her message is unapologetically emasculating: If he does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?

Now that Hillary has won Pennsylvania, it will take a village to help Obama escape from the suffocating embrace of his rival. Certainly Howard Dean will be of no use steering her to the exit. It’s like Micronesia telling Russia to denuke.

“You know, some people counted me out and said to drop out,” said a glowing Hillary at her Philadelphia victory party, with Bill and Chelsea by her side. “Well, the American people don’t quit. And they deserve a president who doesn’t quit, either.”

The Democrats are growing ever more desperate about the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. With gas prices out of control, with the comically oblivious President Bush shimmying around New Orleans — the city he let drown — and Condi sneaking into Baghdad as rockets and mortars hail down on the Green Zone, beating the Republicans should be a cinch.

But the Democrats watch in horror as Hillary continues to scratch up the once silvery sheen on Obama, and as John McCain not only consolidates his own party but encroaches on theirs by boldly venturing into Selma, Ala., on Monday to woo black voters.

They also cringe as Bill continues his honey-crusted-nut-bar meltdown. With his usual exquisite timing, just as Pennsylvanians were about to vote, Hillary’s husband became the first person ever to play the Caucasian Card. First, he blurted out to a radio interviewer that the Obama camp had played the race card against him after he compared Obama’s strength in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s. And then, with a Brobdingnagian finger-wagging on the screen, he denied it to an NBC News reporter.

“You always follow me around and play these little games, and I’m not going to play your games today,” he said, accusing the reporter of looking for “another cheap story to divert the American people from the real urgent issues before us.”

If there’s one person who knows about crass diversions, it’s Bill. But even for him, it was an embarrassing explosion, capped with some blue language to an aide that was caught on air.

The Democrats are eager to move on to an Obama-McCain race. But they can’t because no one seems to be able to show Hillary the door. Despite all his incandescent gifts, Obama has missed several opportunities to smash the ball over the net and end the game. Again and again, he has seemed stuck at deuce. He complains about the politics of scoring points, but to win, you’ve got to score points.

He knew he tanked in the Philadelphia debate, but he was so irritated by the moderators — and by having to stand next to Hillary again — that he couldn’t summon a single merry dart.

Is he skittish around her because he knows that she detests him and he’s used to charming everyone? Or does he feel guilty that he cut in line ahead of her? As the husband of Michelle, does he know better than to defy the will of a strong woman? Or is he simply scared of Hillary because she’s scary?

He is frantic to get away from her because he can’t keep carbo-loading to relate to the common people.

In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage and a Philly cheese steak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.

But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites. That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.

“Why” he pleaded, sounding a bit, dare we say, bitter, “can’t I just eat my waffle?”

His subtext was obvious: Why can’t I just be president? Why do I have to keep eating these gooey waffles and answering these gotcha questions and debating this gonzo woman?

Before they devour themselves once more, perhaps the Democrats will take a cue from Dr. Seuss’s “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” (The writer once mischievously redid it for his friend Art Buchwald as “Richard M. Nixon Will You Please Go Now!”) They could sing:

“The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go. ... I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Hillary R. Clinton, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis. ... You can go in an old blue shoe.

Just go, go, GO!”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/opinion/23dowd.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

^^^^

  I'm really of two minds about whether Hillary is handing the country over to the Republicans for 4 years by continuing to wound Obama, with little to no chance of her actually getting the nomination.

Another way to look at this, besides what Dowd and the other talking head Cassandras moan about so much, is that Hillary is in effect making Obama stronger for the post-convention epic battle. First, she is slowly but surely teaching him that when he gets punched in the mouth, if he seems too fragile to punch back he will lose votes (sad, but true). Next, she is (I hope) getting all his dirty laundry out now. As bad as it is to read now about Reverend I Hate America, or Obama's "Middle Class is Bitter (But I'm Better than That!)" Manifesto, or his relationship with the "Let Me Help You Out and Get You a Bigger Back Yard - No Strings, Dude!" developer, it would have hurt him a lot more if this came out in September. By then, when (not if) McCain brings it up, it will have lost most of its punch.

So, maybe she is effectively innoculating him with Swift Boat virus so he'll be so much stronger in the fall when it really counts!

Just my 2 cents ...

Quoted from alexis

So, maybe she is effectively innoculating him with Swift Boat virus so he'll be so much stronger in the fall when it really counts!

I agree with this; actually: Clinton ran what was essentially a Republican campaign against Obama in Pennsylvania, playing experience, toughness, and traditional values against moralizing liberal effeteness, and won. The voters Obama lost to her are precisely the sort of Democrats who in elections since 1968 or so have been trending Republican and swinging elections in the industrial states. Obama had better face this now and start retooling his campaign.

I'm hard put to see how a Democrat could lose in the fall, but the broader issue beyond November is how a new Democratic President proposes to govern and succeed: I think this was the crucial failure of the Clinton presidency in the nineties. Bill won, but he changed very little and in fact governed largely along the trajectory set by Reagan in the eighties. Obama ought to start thinking of the political coalition he wants to put together and what sorts of broad agenda items or principles could hold it together. If he wants to change the political direction of the country, he has to change the terms of the political debate and lash together a new or at least modified Democratic electoral coalition that will support him.

What he saw from Hillary Clinton was the line of attack that has split working class voters away from the Democratic Party since 1968. What he has to do now is either figure out how to lure those voters back to him (and by implication the Democratic Party in the fall) or replace them with other voters. There are really intriguing possibilities here: should the Democrats try to recreate some modernized version of their old industrial era coalition (the Pennsylvania/Clinton version of the party, in other words), or would they be better off looking, say,  to the Southwest where the population and wealth are growing and look for a new political alignment based on conditions there?

File under: Conventional Wisdom Watch/Bloviators:  


Media Jump Ship From Obama to Clinton

by Thomas B. Edsall
April 24, 2008 10:02 PM

In a blink of an eye, the media has jumped ship from the Obama campaign and become a crucial Clinton ally, pressing just the message -- that Obama is a likely loser in the general election -- that Hillary and her allies have been promoting for the past six weeks.

The new tenor of media coverage is visible almost everywhere, from Politico, Time and The New Republic to The Washington Post and The New York Times.

For Hillary, the shift is a potential lifesaver as she struggles to keep her head above water; without it, she would, metaphorically, drown.

Until now, she, her husband, and her campaign aides have been trying, with little success, to make the case that Obama has potentially fatal flaws. For the first time, reporters working for magazines, newspapers and web sites have abruptly decided that she might well be right, and the results for Obama have been brutal:

The first hard punch was thrown by my friend and colleague John Judis in a widely distributed piece on The New Republic web site, filed sometime around 3AM Wednesday, seven hours after polls closed in Pennsylvania. In the article titled, "The Next McGovern," Judis wrote:

    "[I]f you look at Obama's vote in Pennsylvania, you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the '70s and '80s, led by college students and minorities....Its ideology is very liberal. Whereas in the first primaries and caucuses, Obama benefited from being seen as middle-of-the-road or even conservative, he is now receiving his strongest support from voters who see themselves as 'very liberal.'...[H]e is going to have trouble in Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia, where he will once again be faced by a large white working class vote. He can still win the nomination and lose these primaries. Pennsylvania was the last big delegate prize. But if Obama doesn't find a way now to speak to these voters, he is going to have trouble winning that large swath of states from Pennsylvania through Missouri in which a Democrat must do well to gain the presidency."

Joe Klein, in his weekly column for Time magazine, noted that Clinton has taken a beating,

    "But that was nothing compared with the damage done to Obama, who entered the primary as a fresh breeze and left it stale, battered and embittered - still the mathematical favorite for the nomination but no longer the darling of his party [ Klein could have added, 'no longer the darling of the press.'] In the course of six weeks, the American people learned that he was a member of a church whose pastor gave angry, anti-American sermons, that he was "friendly" with an American terrorist who had bombed buildings during the Vietnam era, and that he seemed to look on the ceremonies of working-class life - bowling, hunting, churchgoing and the fervent consumption of greasy food - as his anthropologist mother might have, with a mixture of cool detachment and utter bemusement."

Politico's Mike Allen describes the changed approach to Obama as a "paradigm shift," specifically citing the "seminal" [Allen is not one to mute his compliments] report of former colleague Chris "The Fix" Cillizza on WashingtonPost.com, the headline of which undoubtedly brought tears of joy to the Clinton campaign: "How Clinton Can Win It."

"A path does exist for Clinton," Cillizza wrote. "The best argument Clinton has at her disposal right now is that Obama cannot win over blue collar, white voters who have been hit hard by the economic slowdown and are looking for a politician to look out for them."

The critical chorus is even resonating across the Atlantic. Under the headline "The Democrats must admit it: Obama would lose to McCain," London Times columnist Anatole Kaletsky wrote: "the conclusion would be fairly obvious, were it not for the political correctness that makes it almost impossible for American politicians or commentators to express such a view: Mr Obama may by unable to carry large industrial states with socially conservative white working-class populations simply because of his race."

The New York Times, never so declarative in a news story, poses the issues as questions. Adam Nagourney writes, "Why has he (Obama) been unable to win over enough working-class and white voters to wrap up the Democratic nomination? ... Is the Democratic Party hesitating about race as it moves to the brink of nominating an African-American to be president?"

While Nagourney raised questions reinforcing doubts about Obama's credibility as a general election candidate, his colleague at the New York Times, Patrick Healy was one of the few reporters to write favorably of the Obama bid in light of recent criticisms. Healy wrote:

"[E]xit polling and independent political analysts offer evidence that Mr. Obama could do just as well as Mrs. Clinton among blocs of voters with whom he now runs behind. Obama advisers say he also appears well-positioned to win swing states and believe he would have a strong shot at winning traditional Republican states like Virginia."

Healy, however, is the exception. While reluctant to speak on the record, Clinton supporters are very pleased with the overall switch in tone of the coverage, particularly the willingness of the media to explore the question of whether Obama could be a loser in November.

The Clinton critique of Obama, and now the critique of much of the press, was further reinforced from another source, Republican strategist Karl Rove, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

    "Mr. Obama is befuddled and angry about the national reaction to what are clearly accepted, even commonplace truths in San Francisco and Hyde Park. How could anyone take offense at the observation that people in small-town and rural American are 'bitter' and therefore 'cling' to their guns and their faith, as well as their xenophobia? Why would anyone raise questions about a public figure who, for only 20 years, attended a church and developed a close personal relationship with its preacher who says AIDS was created by our government as a genocidal tool to be used against people of color, who declared America's chickens came home to roost on 9/11, and wants God to damn America? Mr. Obama has a weakness among blue-collar working class voters for a reason."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/24/media-jump-ship-from-obam_n_98545.html

Good David Brooks column from Tuesday, when I was too busy (lazy) to post it:  


Demography Is King

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 29, 2008

Fifty-five years ago, 80 percent of American television viewers, young and old, tuned in to see Milton Berle on Tuesday nights. Tens of millions, rich and poor, worked together at Elks Lodges and Rotary Clubs. Millions more, rural and urban, read general-interest magazines like Look and Life. In those days, the owner of the local bank lived in the same town as the grocery clerk, and their boys might play on the same basketball team. Only 7 percent of adult Americans had a college degree.

But that’s all changed. In the decades since, some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner.

Retailers, home builders and TV executives identify and reinforce these lifestyle clusters. There are more niche offerings and fewer common experiences.

The ensuing segmentation has reshaped politics. We’re used to the ideological divide between Red and Blue America. This year’s election has revealed a deep cultural gap within the Democratic Party, separating what Stuart Rothenberg calls the two Democratic parties.

In state after state (Wisconsin being the outlier), Barack Obama has won densely populated, well-educated areas. Hillary Clinton has won less-populated, less-educated areas. For example, Obama has won roughly 70 percent of the most-educated counties in the primary states. Clinton has won 90 percent of the least-educated counties. In state after state, Obama has won a few urban and inner-ring suburban counties. Clinton has won nearly everywhere else.

This social divide has overshadowed regional differences. Sixty-year-old, working-class Catholics vote the same, whether they live in Fresno, Scranton, Nashua or Orlando.

The divide has even overshadowed campaigning. Surely the most interesting feature of the Democratic race is how unimportant political events are. The candidates can spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising, but they are not able to sway their opponent’s voters to their side. They can win a stunning victory, but the momentum doesn’t carry over from state to state. They can make horrific gaffes, deliver brilliant speeches, turn in good or bad debate performances, but these things do not alter the race.

In Pennsylvania, Obama did everything conceivable to win over Clinton’s working-class voters. The effort was a failure. The great uniter failed to unite. In this election, persuasion isn’t important. Social identity is everything. Demography is king.

Over the years, different theories have emerged to describe the educated/less-educated divide. Conservatives have gravitated toward the culture war narrative, dividing the country between the wholesome masses and the decadent cultural elites. Some liberals believe income inequality drives everything. They wait for an uprising of economic populism. Other liberals divide the country morally, between the enlightened urbanites and the racist rednecks who will never vote for a black man.

None of these theories really fit the facts. It’s more accurate to say that the country has simply drifted apart into different subcultures. There’s no great hostility between the cultures. Americans have a fuzzy sense of where the boundaries lie. But people in different niches have developed different unconscious maps of reality. They have developed different communal understandings of what constitutes a good leader, of what sort of world they live in. They have developed different communal definitions, which they can’t even articulate, of what they mean by liberty, security and virtue. Demographic groups have begun to function like tribes or cultures.

We can all play the parlor game of trying to figure out why Obama, a Harvard Law grad, resonates with the more educated while Clinton, a Yale Law grad, resonates with the less educated. I’d throw in that Obama’s offer of a secular crusade hits a nerve among his fellow bobos, while Clinton’s talk of fighting and resilience plays well down market.

But these theories only scratch the surface. The mental maps people in different cultures form are infinitely complex and poorly understood even by those who hold them. People pick up millions of subtle signals from body language, word choice, facial expressions, policy positions and biographical details. Efforts to rebrand a candidate to appeal to down-market voters are inevitably crude and counterproductive.

The core message is that even if you take away the ideological differences between the parties, you are still left with profound social gulfs within the parties. There’s poignancy to that. The upscale liberals who revere Obama have spent their lives championing equality and opposing privilege. But they’ve smashed the old WASP social hierarchy only to create a new educational one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/opinion/29brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

You know, I understand what David is trying to say here, but I really can't agree with his last sentence. An educational hierarchy? Please. America's educational standards are eroding faster than its topsoil. Florida is shutting down schools and letting go hundreds of educators to deal with a tight budget. Our education system is so gutted, it's a joke.

i don't care for politics, and i can't vote, so i naturally have no opinion one way or another

Quoted from harihead

You know, I understand what David is trying to say here, but I really can't agree with his last sentence. An educational hierarchy? Please. America's educational standards are eroding faster than its topsoil. Florida is shutting down schools and letting go hundreds of educators to deal with a tight budget. Our education system is so gutted, it's a joke.

You're perfectly correct about our educational system, but Brooks is making a different point: that people with a lot of education have a different world view from those who don't, and that education has become one of the great divides within the Democratic Party. Highly educated Democrats tend to be more liberal and secular than blue collar ones, a fact which can be seen in the political coalitions Clinton and Obama have assembled behind themselves and in how the candidates maneuver for votes. Hillary Clinton, that graduate of Wellesley and Yale, and lawyer by profession, was pumping gas for a trucker and appearing at a John Deere dealership the other day for a reason.

Quoted Text

people with a lot of education have a different world view from those who don't, and that education has become one of the great divides within the Democratic Party.

Yes, very well phrased. My quibble was twofold (and it is just a quibble): first, that this divide is a new thing, and second, that the notion of an educational hierarchy connotes a respect for education that is by no means a normal facet of American life. On the contrary, Americans going back to the pioneers tend to be suspicious of education. Even today, if somebody looks smart, they'd better reach for that beer pretty quick or they will be shunned. Weren't you ever teased at school for being the smart kid? Most Americans hate and fear "smart" people, and education could be a telltale indicator of that (not 100% reliable, but an effective guide).

It's funny, because the Founding Fathers were intellectual snobs (just making my point with a short word) and they did a pretty darned good job of setting up the country. You know, smart people are good for some things. I don't know where we got off on the path of believing smart is bad; you can have smart criminals and dumb criminals, so it wouldn't seem to be a self-protection thing. But at some point the American people decided to celebrate dumb. I think people were actually _pleased_ that GW Bush was a C student (with help). It made him less threatening or more sociable in their minds. Just a good old boy! After seeing the wreck he made of the country, they are now deciding _some_ smarts aren't necessarily bad, but please, let's try to keep it understated and to a minimum!

Am I wrong here? Don't we ridicule smartness with a lot of out geek jokes, or get surly and angry if someone is "talking over our heads"? I just think most Americans want smart people safely tucked away in laboratories making wonder drugs or designing cute gadgets, but don't let them into the "real" world. That is far too threatening to _their_ world view.

I think people were actually _pleased_ that GW Bush was a C student (with help).

It didn't hurt him at election time, that's for sure. Our collective disdain for intellectuals may be a form of vanity, really; most of us want to be exceptional in some sort of way, but we're afraid we're not so we elevate the common as a sort of psychological defense mechanism: it's our way of talking ourselves into accepting our own ordinariness, which we really don't like. As practiced in the mass media, this "ordinary is the best" attitude is usually deeply patronizing to the very people it means to appeal to; just have a look at how your local newspaper is written or what's on a prime time TV schedule. "Dumbing down," a patronizing neologism if their ever was one, is just an I'm-smarter-than-you-are media manager's way of saying that's how you get a larger audience of ordinary people.

Not that intellectuals don't set themselves up for ridicule or worse often enough; political ideologies like socialism and neoconservatism are products of the classroom more than they are real human experience or a consideration of simple facts, and a lot of the literary and drama criticism of the eighties and nineties is so determinedly capital "T" theoretical that its "texts" (a literary theorist's favorite word) very nearly vanish in the fog of their own abstract reasoning. One might hope that more ordinary sorts of people (the best hope here) would be the first to toss all this in Comrade Marx's dustbin of history.  

I think there are some generalizations going on here.

Quoted from Sandra

I think there are some generalizations going on here.

Guilty as charged; but you have to generalize to make almost any argument, and the same goes for rebuttals. That's why nothing is ever settled (one more bloody generalization) and why windbags like me stay in business!  

Another Wednesday morning brings another campaign Day After...  

An End in Sight, At Last
The arithmetic is now so firmly against Mrs Clinton that it would take a miracle for her to win the nomination

Gerard Baker, US Editor

In headline terms it might have looked like a split decision. In the latest instalment of the long-running Democratic primary election saga on Tuesday, Barack Obama won North Carolina and Hillary Clinton won Indiana. These results went roughly as expected - one for each camp.

So at least in terms of the state-wide winners it was a tie, and the race looks set to go on through the final few primaries in the next month.

But beneath the headlines, this was clearly a triumphant night – and perhaps even a decisive one - for Mr Obama.

First, the margins of victory in the two states were crucial. Mr Obama strolled home by 14 percentage points in North Carolina, while Mrs Clinton squeaked by in Indiana by just a couple of points.

That means Mr Obama will almost certainly emerge from the night with a net gain in delegates to the party’s presidential nominating convention. His lead among elected delegates - who are awarded in rough proportion to votes cast - now stands at well over 150, out of more than 3,000 in all, and it seems now completely inconceivable that he could lose in the delegate count with just a handful of states now left to vote.

The night’s results also gave Mr Obama a secure lead in the popular vote. This is, in strict procedural terms, irrelevant. The total vote cast across the country for each candidate is not what counts. It is delegates that matter in the race for the party’s nomination.

But in political terms the vote totals matter enormously. One of Mrs Clinton’s remaining slender hopes of persuading the party that she should be the nominee lay in finishing the primary contests ahead in the popular vote. This - unless she can convince the party that the disqualified primaries in Michigan and Florida should count - is now all but impossible.

The second reason it was a bad night for Mrs Clinton was that she needed a much clearer victory and didn’t get one. Even a straight split in the outcome in the two states would not have been enough to keep her in the race with a serious chance. She needed to win, not just claim a dead heat.

The arithmetic is now so firmly against Mrs Clinton that it would take a miracle for her to win the nomination. Mr Obama is close enough to a Democratic victory to taste it. His lead in delegates elected in state primaries and caucuses is, as we have seen, almost insurmountable. He now trails in so-called super-delegates, the 800 or so senior party officials who hold the contest in their hands, by merely a handful. All that means he now needs to win only about 37 per cent of delegates in the remaining primaries, and the super-delegates who have not yet declared their support.

A third reason for Mr Obama to celebrate Tuesday night was that the political momentum has clearly shifted back to the Illinois senator. He has had a terrible last two months. He lost three straight primaries – in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. He appeared to be sinking in a mire of ranting reverends and condescending comments about the white working class. Most worryingly, Mrs Clinton seemed to be having some success in convincing people that the liberal, slightly aloof Mr Obama might not be able to win a general election contest.

But his victory in North Carolina and the impossibly close outcome in Indiana have righted the boat.

A few more primaries remain – beginning next week in West Virginia. But the real struggle now moves to the minds of the super-delegates. These party grandees have been steadily moving into Mr Obama's camp in the last month even as his campaign has begun to stall.

After his very strong showing in Tuesday’s primaries, that movement is likely to become a stampede. An end to this apparently interminable contest is in sight at last.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article3884579.ece

I might add that another huge problem for Hillary Clinton- again- is going to be raising money. A pitch for donations while the live TV cameras are on has become a standard feature of her primary night speeches.  

My big fear is that if Hillary wins, she will get very little of the black vote (it will take a lot to keep them from staying home because they will feel they were robbed once again); if Obama wins, the huge working middle class vote may well go to McCain (war hero, "straight talker", more like "us" than that "Hussein guy").

Anyone know the racial breakdown of yesterday's vote? Specifically, how many blacks in NC voted for Clinton, and how much of the white middle class working voters did Obama get in Indiana?

Clinton's share of the African American vote in North Carolina was in the 7-9% range, if memory serves: she was simply blown out. Obama, on the other hand, didn't fare too badly in Indiana, despite losing:

[from MSNBC's First Read:]
One thing that jumps out at us is his performance in mostly white Indiana counties north of Indianapolis. He either won them or did much better than we expected. While he still struggled against Clinton in areas south of Indianapolis, his performance north of the city demonstrated his potential in the Midwest. Also, Obama improved with Catholics. After losing that group 70%-30% in Pennsylvania and 63%-36% in Ohio, Obama narrowed that margin to 59%-41% in Indiana; in fact, he won the county that includes South Bend. And the gas-tax debate also appears to have been a winner for Obama. Besides overshadowing (a bit) the Wright story over the days leading into last night’s contests, the debate played into Obama’s core message (that he will change the way Washington works) and played into Clinton’s chief negative (that she’ll say and do anything to win). That said, Obama didn't get the margins you might have expected in Indiana’s northwest counties close to Illinois. Our guess is there might have been a racial divide here, and Wright might have been a factor in the Chicago media market. Even in Lake County, Obama only won 55%-45%. That probably means he lost white vote there badly... You have to wonder how much he would have WON Indiana by if 1) there was no Wright controversy or 2) he had more time.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/05/07/989476.aspx

It's over; Clinton can drag it out- and the woman who lied about being under sniper fire in Bosnia and crassly flogged an economically stupid and politically impossible gasoline tax holiday is fully capable of doing just that- but she can't win.