It's Going to Go Nuclear

Looks like today's primary results won't result in Hillary Clinton leaving the race. While she's only winning Indiana by 5-6%, she "only" lost North Carolina by about 14%, or 10% better than she'd been polling there a few weeks ago.

I think the party leaders will be screaming before next weeks primary in West Virginia for Clinton to drop out. They've been asking kind of nicely up until now; but she'll probably win that in a landslide, and Kentucky on the 20th; and they don't want her to reload the "I'm more electable" cannon and start shooting it off. Considering she's moved up in most polls by 5-10 points in Oregon, and could make that a close race, the leaders want her out.

The more I think about it, the more I think that there is going to be a nuclear war in the Democratic Party, with Clinton lobbing the missiles. And, while I dislike both of them, she's got not only a right to do it, but a point.

The "Electability Arguement", whether Obama supporters like it or not, is a valid one. And, again whether they like it or not, he hasn't done well in any large state that Democrats "have" to win to take the White House except Illinois, which isn't a surprise. When it comes to swing states, he's hasn't done particularly well and doesn't poll well against McCain.

Expect to start hearing from Hillary's folks about electability, and the popular vote, with Florida and Michigan counted, since with those votes she's ahead in the popular vote. In fact, expect her to fully channel Al Gore's 2000 mantra of "every vote must count" on a regular basis for the next week or so, fighting to get the delegates from those states seated.

One other bomb waiting to be dropped on Obama before June is the Tony Rezko verdict. That case rested yesterday, with closing arguements next week and then to the jury. If there is a conviction, expect Clinton's folks to quietly remind Superdelegates that the "GOP Attack Machine"® will have commericals up faster than you can say Swift Boat to remind folks that Obama is a good friend of Mr. Rezko.

I'd like to say I feel sorry for the Democrats for having this long drawn out primary, but I don't. As I've said before, they've brought this on themselves by insisting that everything be "fair" and now it's biting them in the ass.

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Poor Obama Supporters

The poor Barak Obama supporters have been trying to find a way to spin their candidate out of the Rev. Wright mess all week, and not have Obama look like either a fool or a bigot. Unfortunately for them, he put himself in a position that leaves only those two views available.

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent piece in today's Washington Post called The 'Race Speech' Revisited that has those supporters in a tizzy in the comment section. Krauthammer calls the race speech in Philadelphia "that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud", and he's correct. Wright himself proved that on the main stage of the National Press Club, by repeating all of his "out of context" quotes (as Obama called them) in full context, to a national audience.

The current spin du jour for the left is that McCain has the same problem, with John Hagee, who is a white minister and has spewed some pretty lousy stuff himself. Warner Todd Huston at NewsBusters actually wrote a very good breakdown (6 weeks ago!) of why these are two completely different situations.

A quick recap, Obama sat in Wrights pews for two decades, McCain doesn't attend Hagee church, Obama had Wright baptize his children, McCain's kids never knew Hagee, Obama in his book (unlike his recent news conferences) called Wright his spiritual mentor, McCain hasn't claimed anyone as a mentor in that capacity.

E.J. Dionne, spinning for Barack, wants "Fair Play for False Prophets", and tries to put Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and others into the same mold as Wright when it comes to politics. Again, the comparisons fail since no candidate has other than Obama has spent a majority of their adult life in the pews of any of these guys.

I also challenge his assertion that the media isn't as tough on them as they are on Wright. The media has been beating up on "religious right" ministers since the Reagan years. If anything, they've given black ministers like Al Sharpton a pass on their rhetoric and actually made them out to be somehow above the fray; when in fact they stir the pot.

With the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina coming up Tuesday it will be interesting to see how much this week has hurt Obama. He's never done well with the white working class, and if those numbers take a big drop in these to primaries expect to hear Hillary talking about electability louder and louder in the next couple of weeks.

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