ABC News: Hope Against Hope, Clinton Knows Comebacks, but Do Threats Hold Promise?

[loveangelc]

Math, it turns out, is as stubborn as the Clintons themselves.

The superdelegates are moving (and suddenly not so super-slowly) in Obama's direction. (Which of these drips will trigger the flood?)

Wright was wrong for Sen. Barack Obama, but not wrong enough, evidently. (We look forward to hearing from the Clinton campaign why polls once again don't matter.)

Campaign debts are piling up faster than Bill Clinton and James Carville can pile on homespun expressions.

And Sen. John McCain can enjoy the show, his ticket punched and his image his own as he defines himself and the race in a way the Democrats can't.

It is, naturally, set up just as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wants it. (Just ask Camp Clinton -- always sure she can go all the way, even when it isn't Opening Day.)

The Clinton line this Monday: This is a candidate who's performed best when she's counted out. In this pause in the voting action, she's staying strong in polls in the next round of states, weathering calls to step aside -- and using them as rallying cries/organizing tools.

All of which could matter quite a bit if this was still a traditional race, wielded over that quaint quantity known as voters.

But the current Clinton calculus states that a race for delegates is not about the delegates anymore, a contest for votes is maybe not about the popular vote. (And some of her wins are turning out not to really be wins).

And there's a fair chance she'll have to destroy the Democratic Party in her quest to save it. At this critical juncture, Clinton is choosing confrontation over conciliation.

-snip-

Obama, D-Ill., doesn't need to apply pressure that's building from within.

Gauge the prevalence of this sentiment inside the party and you may have a good read on where to find the party's endgame: "This thing has turned from being an adventure to being a grind," Democratic strategist Bob Shrum tells the Los Angeles Times.

Fortunately for Clinton, Nora Ephron isn't a superdelegate. "It's turned into an unending last episode of Survivor," she writes for HuffingtonPost. "They're eating rats and they're frying bugs, and they're frying rats and they're eating bugs; no one is ever going to get off the island and I can't take it any more."

Now that the saga of Rev. Jeremiah Wright has played out, we'll see if this inspires a Mark Penn memo: "Barack Obama has extended his lead over Hillary Clinton among Democrats nationally to 52% to 42%, the third consecutive Gallup Poll Daily tracking report in which he has held a statistically significant lead, and Obama's largest lead of the year so far. . . . This marks the first time either candidate has held a double-digit lead over the other since Feb. 4-6, at which point Clinton led Obama by 11 percentage points."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=3105288&page=1 <--more

[Cha]

1. Yeah, it's all about hilary and bil..

[loveangelc]

2. k

[SunsetDreams]

3. Did anyone see this?

"It's a strange turn of the road when I find, among the candidates running this year, that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain." -- Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., on ABC's "This Week," continuing the strangest turn in politics this decade.



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