Baltimore SUN piece on the nomination race so far:

[saltpoint]

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.clinton17feb17,0,1052310,full.story

[babylonsister]

1. Not so inevitable now, is she. I wonder if the American Prospect

has since done a mea culpa. Politics-gotta love it. :hi:

[saltpoint]

2. Hi, babylonsister. Good point -- I'm not sure what the PROSPECT is

up to these days, but something tells me they're layin' low on predictions!


:hi:

[Yael]

3. She is reactive, he is proactive

with a lot of focus on the attacks launched in WI.

Interesting.

[dkf]

4. He shows he has thought it through better than she has.

And he executes well.

[Yael]

5. ie -- Executive Leadership qualities

The tone of the articles being published today is quite astonishing. All of them seem to be focusing their tone on the mistakes her campaign has made and is continuing to make.

[dkf]

11. Yes, this is the way history will view the race

especially if it comes down to the super delegates and lands up destroying the party.

[Yael]

13. There will be textboos written about how to conduct a 50 state ground game

after this is over -- win OR lose.

[saltpoint]

6. A really good story would be the proverbial fly-on-the-wall talk

in both camps about the nomination race leading up to the big night in Denver next fall.

[kentuck]

7. This quote is right on target:

The "Clinton model is very old-fashioned and inefficient. It's based on what they did in the '90s," said Bill Carrick, an unaligned Democratic strategist. Obama has "made sure they could maximize the amount of money they can raise on the Net. That's just a monster of an advantage."

Some Democrats say Clinton is running on a flawed premise: that superior experience is what party voters are looking for.

"There's this big hunger for change and something different, and so she was running into a headwind that was incredibly strong," said Carrick. "She's certainly very smart, and she's got encyclopedic knowledge of policy, and her positions are well thought out. But people are more interested in being inspired and having somebody speak to their hopes and dreams and aspirations, as opposed to wanting the most substantive, policy-oriented candidate."

[saltpoint]

8. Hi, kentuck. Yes. I think that's the essence of the piece and maybe

the caption for the Clinton effort to date.

Often news pieces are thrown together slapdash, but this one hangs together pretty well.

[elana i am]

9. i know this puts me at odds with most

other non-clinton folks here but i agree with this:

He added, "Just a few weeks ago, it was one of the most brilliant campaigns you've seen, and now everybody says they've done all these things wrong. You can't say it was great and now it's horrible because she's in a dogfight."

as a candidate she has some fatal flaws that cannot be fixed:
1.)her IWR vote
2.)her kyl-lieberman vote
3.)her pro-lobby stance
4.)her past support of nafta
5.)the lying philandering creep she's married to

now, i might could forgive 1-4 if she had only committed 1 or 2 of these "mortal sins", but not ALL of them. but no matter, because #5 disqualifies her from contention in my mind. i can't and i won't vote for her because with her we get her husband. if someone has a problem with that they can kiss my ample ass.

that said, aside from bill's momentary public asshattery and a recent whiff of potential dirty pool with the superdelegates, i see no problem with her campaign other than a bit of underestimation of obama. however, that does not make a campaign bad. it's something that can be tweaked or adjusted.

as far as the negativity, meh. people can argue all they want about negativity, but that's SOP these days, and considering the '04 swiftboating and most of the regional elections i've watched in recent years, this presidential election cycle has been fairly benign. obama's just been lucky that his on-record negativity can be attributed to a response to negativity instigated by the clinton camp. IMO, it just hasn't been that bad.

honestly, until recently clinton looked like she had it in the bag in spite of the fact that obama was making headway. to his credit, and my pleasure, he caught on faster and more completely than i or anyone could have hoped or predicted. a month ago, before the iowa pimary, when i would talk to people about obama they would all be like "who?"

anyway, i would attribute at least some of obama's success to hillary's inherent fatal flaws, not to anything her campaign did or didn't do.

[saltpoint]

10. Agree that tweaks and adjustments can be made, but it's the fact that

they must be made when she's lost a huge lead that prompts the writer's assesment, IMO.

Currently she's in the lead in polling from Ohio, Rhode Island, and Texas. I'm not sure about Vermont. But she faces a tough fight on Tuesday in Wisconsin and my guess is Obama will win at least Hawai'i on that day. So momentum may be shifting against even a well-run campaign.

[elana i am]

12. yeah, the wheels

may now finally be starting to come off the bus.