So, how was your evening? It’s late, and I just got home, so I’ll save a full post for tomorrow. But, in brief: As I said the other day, a knockout punch in either Texas and Ohio would’ve been grand. Still, Clinton did not win either state by the margins she needed. So, simply put, her campaign from now herein is Dead Woman Walking, mathematically speaking. As such, I’m not too depressed about the Texas and Ohio results, frankly…You can’t always get what you want, but we got what we needed, and, even with a 10-point margin in Ohio, Sen. Clinton has only managed to forestall the inevitable.
I am bugged, however, that the Clinton campaign’s pathetic shenanigans this week have been seemingly rewarded by the voters, particularly in the Buckeye State. (Late deciders seem to have broke heavily for Clinton in both states.) But, oh well. More tomorrow when we have a fuller picture, and I’ve had a few hours’ rest to steel myself to the now very real possibility of several more weeks of Clinton hacks insulting our intelligence daily with their ridiculous spin.
Well, I don’t know about the rest of the state, but Travis County Precinct 126 had a record breaking caucus that broke 454 to 84 for Obama. In a precinct that has something like 2500 voters, that’s a pretty amazing turnout. Things were remarkably civil and ran pretty smoothly, despite the chaos.
To be perfectly honest, I’m a little miffed that Obama wasn’t able to knock her out of the race before these contests. I don’t like swallowing any kind of conventional wisdom, but there is some truth to the idea that any candidate who had lost 11 straight races should have been bleeding out on the table, but Obama pretty much just stood back and let her fix herself up. I’m not sure why his campaign wasn’t pushing the fact that if she was any other candidate, this race would’ve been considered done and dusted, but the media kept propping her up because they like the fight. THAT’s the media bias that’s been at work here.
I’m definitely more worried than you are about this. The tight pledged delegate lead is not going to matter much if the final margin is close enough for the court of popular opinion to make Obama look like a crippled candidate and cause a superdelegate rebellion at the convention. He really needs to start fighting back here — and I don’t mean dirty tricks from the Clinton playbook, I just mean showing some fire and demonstrating that he doesn’t take bullshit lying down.
Hopefully when delegate totals from last night, including those from Texas’s caucus, get published, major news outlets will get off the “change of momentum” story.
The worst part about last night is that it (probably) wasn’t enough to get party leadership to step in and ask her to bow out.
Well, hell. Looks like it’s news blackout time for awhile. I’m still not exactly sure what happened last week to change things. The NAFTA business sort of breaking the spell of positivity and “new politics” and “telling people hard truths”? The idiotic 3AM ad actually worked? Nothing happened that seemed very major at all to me, but the electorate moved 8-10% somehow.
Obama’s campaign need to learn that you reassure Canada after Ohio votes. Or that you don’t have to at all, because everyone in the world knows that anything said about NAFTA in the context of an Ohio election is likely pandering. Of course, I would have much rather he refused to pander at all, and tried to change to conversation and air the truth that what’s going on in the Rust Belt can’t be fixed just by tweaking NAFTA, but I guess this wasn’t the time to take risks. It’s also not the time to take the air out of the ball and quit fighting altogether though, so I hope they learn a lesson from that.