The Democrats' anti-momentum

[Tatiana]

<snip>

With the chances to rerun the outlaw Michigan and Florida primaries now at the vanishing point, it may be time to inquire about a do-over for the rest of America. This is not an argument for Clinton, who otherwise probably has too far to go and too few remaining primaries to get there. But after a week punctuated by Obama's right-stuff response to wrong-way Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Clinton's document dump of today-tea-was-served White House schedules, Democrats are being barraged with new information about the candidates long after most of them have made a binding decision on a nominee. It is akin to being given a subscription to Consumer Reports the day after you bought a new car.

The marketing of the Democratic race is made to order for this era of narrow-casting and the long tail on the bell curve. Unless you live in one of the eight states left to vote (Pennsylvania, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, South Dakota, Montana and Oregon) or are among the more than 300 or so undeclared superdelegates, your views no longer matter.

As a result, Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama on Friday was not really designed to sway voters. In the hollers of West Virginia, the Hatfields and the McCoys had not been asking each other, "I wonder which way Richardson is going to jump." What Richardson's blessing signified was that an ambitious politician with close ties to Bill Clinton (they watched the Super Bowl together) decided that his self-interest would be enhanced by choosing Obama rather than Hillary. Small wonder that the Obama campaign chortled in a press release that since the Feb. 5 primaries, 62 superdelegates have endorsed their candidate while only two have opted for Clinton.

With little room to maneuver, the Clinton campaign is gamely trying to use the polls to argue that the former first lady is more electable than a first-term senator from Illinois. As Mark Penn, Clinton's pollster and chief strategist, argued in a http://blog.hillaryclinton.com/blog/main/2008/03/20/150814">memo to the press last Thursday, "The more that voters learn about Barack Obama, the more his ability to beat John McCain is declining compared to Hillary." By cherry-picking state polls and probably exaggerating the lasting significance of Obama's shaky past few weeks, Penn offers a blizzard of statistics to ice his preordained conclusion.

But claims like these are dubious nearly eight months before the November election -- no mater which candidate is making them. Mark Mellman, who was John Kerry's 2004 pollster but is neutral in the current presidential race, said, "A lot of things can happen between March and November. My own view is that either one of them would win in November because the fundamentals favor the Democrats. But you have no real way of knowing who would be stronger against McCain." Mellman dismisses the far-in-advance horse-race polls that purport to measure how Obama and Clinton would perform against the Republican nominee: "People are very mediocre predictors of their own future behavior."

(more...)

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/03/24/dem_remorse/

I think the author is correct that if Obama holds his own in Indiana and North Carolina (May 6), then this thing is over. But the extended primary season turned out to be a pretty good thing, IMO, for the upcoming general in that ALL states have now achieved significance and we have people on the ground (not to mention candidates on the stump) courting voters in places we never would have had this nomination been wrapped up on Super Tuesday.

[grantcart]

1. kick

[Tatiana]

2. .

:kick: