Death Watch Postponed

The death watch on Hillary Clinton's campaign has been given a reprieve, but not much of one. For every headline touting her 3 wins last night another, or the same story pointed out that Democratic delegate allocating made the victories pretty hollow. She won the popular votes, but really didn't make up any ground in the delegate race.

The Superdelegate, who've been flip flopping like, well Democrats on defense, are still going to be the key to the race. While Obama can claim droves have moved to his side of the aisle after 11 straight victories, he now has the shadow of Tony Rezko's trial hanging over his candidacy, which could flip them back to Hillary. Worse for him is the theory that the defense could issue a subpoena to have him testify for Rezko, which probably wouldn't help his standing with those superdelegates.

John McCain on the other hand won his nomination last night, and gets to spend the entire spring working over the Democrats, without having to worry about delegate counts or trials. While Clinton and Obama have to spend the next 7 weeks leading to Pennsylvania beating each other up over differences in their very similar stances, McCain gets to take pot shots at those stances.

With Rezko's trial starting, and McCain having sewed up the nomination for the GOP, the DNC has to be wondering if this year will once again be one where they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

This isn't a new thing for the Democrats. In 1988 Mike Dukakis held a huge summer lead over George H.W. Bush, then Willie Horton started turning up in ads all over the country. Like Rezko the Democratic establishment knew about Horton, and had been warned he could end up being the "deal breaker", but ignored the warnings. This time around former DNC treasurer, Joe Cini who had already been tied to the scandal 2 years ago, should have provided the warning, but it's been ignored.