I found this article very interesting.
The front-runner is trapped in an unchanging race that will be hard for him to lose -- but is proving impossible for him to end.In a black zippered Barack Obama '08 sweatshirt, with the downtown skyline hovering outside his 11th-floor office window, David Axelrod tried to imagine where the presidential campaign might be right now if a persistent foe named Hillary Clinton did not exist. "Obviously, we'd be focused on McCain and the general
. And to some extent we've got to be doing that right now," said Axelrod, the architect of Obama's rise from upstart challenger to the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination. "Remember we were already into the general at this point four years ago."
But Axelrod and the rest of the Obama high command are also realists. They radiate the quiet confidence that Obama will be the nominee and the fatalistic acceptance that the timetable requires patience. They understand that in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, virtually every demographic cohort of this largely white, middle-aged and older, non-college-educated, economically hard-pressed electorate favors Clinton. Despite Obama's delegate lead (the Washington Post gives him a 134-vote edge with just eight state primaries to go), the finish line still shimmers in the distance. "The fundamentals of the race haven't changed," Axelrod said. "But there are cards to be played before anyone makes a decision. This can go on for a while."
Indeed it can, although the promise by Amy Poehler channeling Hillary Clinton on "Saturday Night Live" to keep campaigning until "after the Inauguration" may be an exaggeration. After all, never in modern political history has a candidate in Clinton's predicament -- trailing, but having won more than 45 percent of the delegates in the primaries and caucuses -- not taken the fight all the way to the convention floor. Maybe if Clinton fails to win either the Indiana or North Carolina primaries on May 6, the former first lady might feel compelled to convene a Washington press conference to make "an important political announcement." Or possibly, as some in the Obama camp privately hope, Clinton (who is no longer claiming to be raising $1 million a day) will run out of money before the primaries end with a whimper June 3 in South Dakota and Montana.
snip
These days, Hillary Clinton seems propelled by both Scarlett O'Hara's dogged denial ("Tomorrow is another day") and the cockeyed optimism of Mr. Micawber ("Something will turn up") in "David Copperfield." But this week, all that has turned up for the New York senator has been more bad news. Her campaign planned the Friday afternoon document dump of the Clintons' tax returns at the shank end of a slow political news week. The couple's post-White House income of $109 million signified buck-raking that is hard to camouflage. Particularly eye-popping was the $15.4 million that Bill Clinton received for unspecified work from Ron Burkle's Yucaipa investment firm, which boasts the ruler of Dubai as a major investor. Probably more harmful was the news that campaign strategist and pollster Mark Penn met with Colombian officials last week to plot how to win congressional passage of a free-trade agreement that candidate Clinton fervently opposes. Penn insisted that he was acting in his capacity as the CEO of Burson-Marsteller. And it turned out to be a good thing for Penn that he had never given up his lucrative day job, since Sunday night the Clinton campaign announced that he had stepped down (or, in truth, been pushed out) as chief strategist. Even the fig leaf that Penn would still be providing polling services to the Clinton campaign was undermined by the recent recruitment of a rival pollster, Geoff Garin.
Much more at link
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/04/07/obama/
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