FABULOUS!

The women pitty vote?

Oh common, there could be a better narrative or explanation than that.

I would hope that she would at least be credited with re-tooling her message.

"Time and again in this race, though, Hillary has had her back to the wall, only to find that the female vote, perhaps driven by the sight of Hillary on the verge of defeat, has rallied around her and changed the story-line of the race."

Stay tuned, Hillary is tied to the RR track and only the women can untie the ropes so she escapes the man with the black moustache.

a grim set of circumstances that Hillary advisers have been anticipating for some time.

I doubt this. They had no plans for after Super Tuesday; they are staggering in the dark. In fact, I can just picture an HRC adviser saying, ala the Bushies, "No one could have anticipated that Obama would run the table for the rest of February."

The race now has a new, never before seen element: momentum.

There were enough expectations (there's that word again) of a Clinton victory in Maine that the Obama team will be able to get some extra mileage out of this.

Polls in TX & OH after Tuesday will show us what is really happening.

And as for a late Hillary surge in VA, it seems a little less likely now that there have been a number of races under their belts and the size of the state is much larger.

The irony that I see is that the calendar was designed to favor a candidacy by Hillary. Feb. 5th was to end it. But this new stretch of the road is proving to be her undoing, something they probably never ever envisioned. Probably never gave it much thought.

i will be looking to see how HRC new campaign manager will respond to these 4 losses!!! Will Hillary go on the attack? its obvious that this "nice" Hillary that we have seen lately ain't working...
They need a win to get some positive news coverage...Tomorrow all the pundits will be diggin HRC grave...But as we have seen, Hillary is like a vampire, you have to stab the thing in its heart, anything less and she still can come back and surprise you...

Its time for Hillary to step aside!

This split system is only going to hurt the party and our chance to gain the white house AND solidify the congress.

Step down and maybe the Big O will give you a spot on the Supreme court!

Much has been made of the "Obama's the caucus guy, not the primary guy" kind-of talk. Some research here, folks, is below. The truth is Obama and Clinton are virtually ties on the number of primaries won, and Obama's won just about all the other races, which have been caucuses. So Clinton's just sour grapes (she certainly hasn't minimized her one solitary Nevada caucus win):

Obama Primary Winners (9 altogether):
South Carolina
Alabama
Connecticut
Illinois
Missouri
Utah
Louisiana
Delaware
Georgia

Clinton's Primary Winners (10 altogether):
New Hampshire
Michigan
Arizona
California
Massachusetts
New Jersey
New York
Oklahoma
Tennessee
Arkansas

Obama's Caucus Winners (9 altogether):
Iowa
Alaska
Colorado
Idaho
Kansas
Minnesota
North Dakota
Nebraska
Washington

Clinton's Caucus Winners (1 altogether):
Nevada

Uncontested or Inconclusive at this writing:
Florida
Michigan
Maine
New Mexico

The problem is that Hillary's hopes for Ohio, PA, and TX are like Guilliani's hopes for FL. Obama has a big head of steam. He looks and smells like a winner. And people like to vote for a winner. If Obama blows through the potomac primary and Wisconsin on the 19th, he will likely win TX, OH, and PA. That's what momentum is all about.

Intrade Market:

70.0 - Obama

30.0 - Clinton

The "odds" are for the Dem Nomination.

(odds also looking good for presidency for Obama)

Let's keep the momentum going.

Very good day for Obama! ♪♪♪

Good job, Dana. It's nice to see it laid out like that.

Good point about Michigan. I'll restate. The only reason I left out Maine was that less than 100% of the vote is in...but, hell, we can agree, i think that the call for Obama's takeover there is good. Thanks, Zell!

Obama Primary Winners (9 altogether):
South Carolina
Alabama
Connecticut
Illinois
Missouri
Utah
Louisiana
Delaware
Georgia

Clinton's Primary Winners (9 altogether):
New Hampshire
Arizona
California
Massachusetts
New Jersey
New York
Oklahoma
Tennessee
Arkansas

Obama's Caucus Winners (10 altogether):
Iowa
Alaska
Colorado
Idaho
Kansas
Minnesota
North Dakota
Nebraska
Washington
Maine

Clinton's Caucus Winners (1 altogether):
Nevada

Uncontested or Inconclusive at this writing:
Florida
Michigan
New Mexico

As of now, Hillary has encountered the perfect storm: of (1) Clinton Fatigue, (2) Obama mania, and (3) the specter of John McCain, to whom she would be McCain Lite.

At 79% reporting, it's basically 59-41.

Let's all get re-energized... Donate, volunteer, make calls, knock on doors, stuff like that.

Obama '08.

What ever happened to the Iraq War issue. Do not let them con you into believing that the Surge is working. Five American Soldiers were blown to smithereens yesterday.

Now read the following report about what happened in Iraq this very day, and the same kind of thing has been happening on a more frequent basis.

When you read it, keep in mind that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton still thinks that her vote to authorize the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq was not a Reckless and Catastrophic mistake on her part. George W. Bush, and John McCain agree with her. Now read what happened in Iraq this very day. The Surge is working; My Arse!

BAGHDAD - Car bombs and gunmen struck new U.S. allies, police and civilians Sunday in northern Iraq, killing as many as 53 people. The spate of attacks came even as the American military released a captured diary and another document they say show al-Qaida in Iraq cracking under a Sunni revolt against its brutal tactics.
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The violence coincided with a visit by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Baghdad, where he warned that hard choices face Iraq's political leaders on how to stabilize the country despite promising new signs of progress toward reconciliation.

The deadliest bombing on Sunday was near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, against a checkpoint manned jointly by Iraqi police and members of an awakening group.

Iraqi police said a suicide truck bomber targeted a checkpoint manned by U.S.-allied fighters and Iraqi police at the entrance of a bridge in the district of Yathrib on the outskirts of Balad. Security forces opened fire on the driver, but he managed to detonate his payload, devastating a nearby car market and other stores.

Police in the joint coordination center of the surrounding Salahuddin province and hospital officials said 34 people were killed and 37 others were wounded. Capt. Kadim Hamid said many residents in the predominantly Sunni area had removed victims directly from the site because they feared going to the hospital in Balad's mostly Shiite center.

The U.S. military put the casualty toll at 23 killed, 25 wounded and said a car bomb exploded near an Iraqi checkpoint in a market in Balad, but it did not confirm it was a suicide attack. U.S. and Iraqi forces had secured the area and the wounded had been evacuated to hospitals, according to a statement.

It was one of the worst bombings this year amid a recent lull in violence and underscored U.S. warnings that al-Qaida in Iraq remains a serious threat despite military offensives that have severely curtailed its operations.

The explosion came hours after suspected al-Qaida-linked insurgents stormed two villages near the Syrian border but were repelled by U.S.-allied fighters and Iraqi security forces in clashes that left at least 22 people dead.

Sheik Fawaz al-Jarba, the head of the Mosul anti-al-Qaida group, and other officials said the 22 killed included 10 militants and six members of the so-called awakening group in the area, as well as four women and two children.

The U.S. military in northern Iraq confirmed an attack on compound housing its Sunni allies against al-Qaida in Iraq near Sinjar, about 60 miles west of Mosul, saying five U.S.-allied fighters were killed, five wounded and 10 insurgents were killed.

Insurgents also attacked a group of civilians elsewhere in the northern Ninevah province on Sunday, killing two men and one child and wounding two other men, two women and two infants, according to the military.

Iraqi police also said four civilians were killed Sunday when a tanker truck laden with explosives blew up near an Iraqi army checkpoint on Mosul's southern outskirts.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has promised a "decisive battle" against the terror network in Mosul but given no start date. The U.S. military has warned it will not be a swift strike, but rather a grinding campaign that will require more firepower.

An al-Qaida front group for northern Iraq warned last week in an Internet statement that it was launching its own campaign in Mosul and surrounding areas.

In all, 70 people were reported killed or found dead by police on Sunday, one of the highest nationwide death tolls in recent months. That figure included three policemen who perished in a suicide car bombing at a checkpoint in the Anbar city of Fallujah and 10 bullet-riddled bodies showing signs of torture.

Hillary would make a good head of the department of Health, Education and Welfare, if there still was such a cabinet position.

Hope she joins the Obama team instead of fighting the wave.

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don't criticize what you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
The old road is rapidly aging
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend a hand
For the times, they are a-changing

On Minnesota again, I noticed that Al Franken campaigned caucus night in senate district 44, his hometown and an area of the Twin Cities with a significant percentage of suburban Jewish voters. Obama got 67% of the vote in 44.

Obama's victory effectively left Hillary advisers grappling with the possibility that the worst case scenario that they'd been anticipating for some time could come true: The prospect of no victories for the whole month of February.

I know it's been a whole 5 days since Super Tuesday, but you seem to have forgotten NY, NJ, CA, OK, MA, AZ, TN, AK, and very likely NM.

Obama's victory effectively left Hillary advisers grappling with the possibility that the worst case scenario that they'd been anticipating for some time could come true: The prospect of no victories for the whole month of February.

I know it's been a whole 5 days since Super Tuesday, but you seem to have forgotten NY, NJ, CA, OK, MA, AZ, TN, AK, and very likely NM.

seems appropriate here:

By Kate Michelman

Feb. 08, 2008 | As the red light atop the camera went dark on Monday night, there was still much more I wanted to say to Chris Matthews, much more that I needed to say.

So for the moment, my time on "Hardball" continues here.

Knowing that I had just announced my support for Barack Obama for president after having earlier supported my old friend John Edwards, Matthews had me on his show Monday. His first Hardball to me was one of his typical zingers: "Kate Michelman, how does it feel to have abandoned the cause of your life?"

The simple answer, Chris, is that I haven't -- in fact, my endorsement of Barack, just like my earlier embrace of John Edwards, is all about exalting the causes of my life. Not about repudiating them.

I haven't abandoned my commitment to the women's movement -- and anyone who knows me understands I never will. My endorsement of Barack Obama is actually a celebration of that commitment, and an honest reflection of what I have been fighting for for over 40 years.

The women's movement is about free choice, self-determination and challenging a status quo that fails a lot of Americans, not just women. And it is not about going along. It's about transcending, about having the freedom to follow one's heart, about creating and pursuing new opportunities, and about the American dream being for all Americans.

Chris' gotcha-type question to me and the semi-criticism implicit in it -- that as a woman I have some biological obligation to unreservedly support whatever woman is running -- are exactly the sentiments I faced when I first started working for a woman's right to choose. If women who vote for men are traitors, then are men who vote for women also traitors? What about African-Americans who vote for whites? Or whites who vote for African-Americans?

Laying this guilt trip, this hypocrisy, on women -- saying that those women who don't vote for other women are turncoats -- is tantamount to saying that women who exercise independent thought haven't the right to do that either. Could there be a more anti-feminist contention?

When a presidential candidate's core values are unity, equality, opportunity and creating an atmosphere of respect and harmony, both nationally and internationally, then that candidate's vision aligns with the best hopes and dreams of the women's movement. And that is precisely Barack Obama's vision.

For me, the choice between supporting Barack or Hillary was the choice between supporting someone who I know would be very good, Hillary Clinton, or supporting someone who I know could be truly great. And right now, on those causes that define me and millions of other women, we shouldn't settle -- and I won't settle -- for anything less than "great."

My cause has been to create a society in which women are not judged on the basis of gender or subjected to sexist attitudes or expectations. My cause has been to ensure that every woman, and not any government, has the sole right to make the decision about when and under what circumstances it's best to become a mother. And as a woman who was once a single mother of three little girls and who was forced onto welfare and lived without healthcare and childcare, my cause has been the economic security and dignity of all women and their families.

Matthews' other Hardball, which also deserved more time than the red light gave me, was: "How can you pass, Kate, on the opportunity to support a woman for president when this may be the last chance for that to happen in your lifetime?"

Nothing in life is guaranteed, but I sure do plan on being around a while longer. And just how long does Matthews believe it will be before another supremely qualified woman who currently sits in Congress or occupies a governor's mansion throws her hat into the presidential ring?

In his mind, aren't Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Gov. Janet Napolitano already at least as qualified as, say, Gov. Mike Huckabee?

It may be news to Chris Matthews, but great women have already arrived on the national stage -- and they are here to stay. They are running state governments, big cities and major corporations. And every day in the armed forces they are defending our families and our country.

Hardballs are just part of the game -- and I am happy to stand in the batter's box and take any of them on. But spitballs aren't part of the game.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/02/08/chris_matthews/

Something I've been wondering about: recent polls seem to show Obama beating McCain by a comfortable margin at the national level. Does anyone know of a breakdown of the numbers on a state-by-state basis? In other words, does his apparent national support translate into an electoral college win? (No ax to grind here, just curious, because I haven't noticed such numbers yet.)

Clinton wins a white working class state with more poor people than white wine swilling liberals
and uppity college students.

How do Clininites respond to this narrative?

Source: nytimes.com
Title: Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War

WHAT if a presidential candidate held what she billed as “the largest, most interactive town hall in political history” on national television, and no one noticed?

The untold story in the run-up to Super Tuesday was Hillary Clinton’s elaborate live prime-time special the night before the vote. Presiding from a studio in New York, the candidate took questions from audiences in 21 other cities. She had plugged the event four days earlier in the last gasp of her debate with Barack Obama and paid a small fortune for it: an hour of time on the Hallmark Channel plus satellite TV hookups for the assemblies of supporters stretching from coast to coast.

But I’m glad I watched every minute, right up until Mrs. Clinton was abruptly cut off in midsentence so Hallmark could resume its previously scheduled programming (a movie promising “A Season for Miracles,” aptly enough). However boring, this show was a dramatic encapsulation of how a once-invincible candidate ended up in a dead heat, crippled by poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product leeched of most human qualities. What’s more, it offered a naked preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to come.

For a campaign that began with tightly monitored Web “chats” and then planted questions at its earlier town-hall meetings, a Bush-style pseudo-event like the Hallmark special is nothing new, of course. What’s remarkable is that instead of learning from these mistakes, Mrs. Clinton’s handlers keep doubling down.

Less than two weeks ago she was airlifted into her own, less effective version of “Mission Accomplished.” Instead of declaring faux victory in Iraq, she starred in a made-for-television rally declaring faux victory in a Florida primary that was held in defiance of party rules, involved no campaigning and awarded no delegates. As Andrea Mitchell of NBC News said, it was “the Potemkin village of victory celebrations.”

The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to “who knows how many” Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the “Yes We Can” Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)

Two days after her town-hall extravaganza, Mrs. Clinton revealed the $5 million loan she had made to her own campaign to survive a month in which the Obama operation had raised $32 million to her $13.5 million. That poignant confession led to a spike in contributions that Mr. Obama also topped. Though Tuesday was largely a draw in popular votes and delegates, every other indicator, from the candidates’ real and virtual crowds to hard cash, points to a steadily widening Obama-Clinton gap. The Clinton campaign might be an imploding Potemkin village itself were it not for the fungible profits from Bill Clinton’s murky post-presidency business deals. (The Clintons, unlike Mr. Obama, have not released their income-tax returns.)

The campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards. This was all too apparent in the Hallmark show. In its carefully calibrated cross section of geographically and demographically diverse cast members — young, old, one gay man, one vet, two union members — African-Americans were reduced to also-rans. One black woman, the former TV correspondent Carole Simpson, was given the servile role of the meeting’s nominal moderator, Ed McMahon to Mrs. Clinton’s top banana. Scattered black faces could be seen in the audience. But in the entire televised hour, there was not a single African-American questioner, whether to toss a softball or ask about the Clintons’ own recent misadventures in racial politics.

The Clinton camp does not leave such matters to chance. This decision was a cold, political cost-benefit calculus. In October, seven months after the two candidates’ dueling church perorations in Selma, USA Today found Hillary Clinton leading Mr. Obama among African-American Democrats by a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent. But once black voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought. In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others), “the black candidate” (as Clinton strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself).

The result? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote. The campaign saw this coming and so saw no percentage in bestowing precious minutes of prime-time television on African-American queries.

That time went instead to the Hispanic population that was still in play in Super Tuesday’s voting in the West. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles had a cameo, and one of the satellite meetings was held in the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s smart politics, especially since Mr. Obama has been behind the curve in wooing this constituency.

But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.”

It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.”

If that was the intent, it didn’t work. Mrs. Clinton did pile up her expected large margin among Latino voters in California. But her tight grip on that electorate is loosening. Mr. Obama, who captured only 26 percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada last month, did better than that in every state on Tuesday, reaching 41 percent in Arizona and 53 percent in Connecticut. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign’s attempt to drive white voters away from Mr. Obama by playing the race card has backfired. His white vote tally rises every week. Though Mrs. Clinton won California by almost 10 percentage points, among whites she beat Mr. Obama by only 3 points.

The question now is how much more racial friction the Clinton campaign will gin up if its Hispanic support starts to erode in Texas, whose March 4 vote it sees as its latest firewall. Clearly it will stop at little. That’s why you now hear Clinton operatives talk ever more brazenly about trying to reverse party rulings so that they can hijack 366 ghost delegates from Florida and the other rogue primary, Michigan, where Mr. Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. So much for Mrs. Clinton’s assurance on New Hampshire Public Radio last fall that it didn’t matter if she alone kept her name on the Michigan ballot because the vote “is not going to count for anything.”

Last month, two eminent African-American historians who have served in government, Mary Frances Berry (in the Carter and Clinton years) and Roger Wilkins (in the Johnson administration), wrote Howard Dean, the Democrats’ chairman, to warn him of the perils of that credentials fight. Last week, Mr. Dean became sufficiently alarmed to propose brokering an “arrangement” if a clear-cut victory by one candidate hasn’t rendered the issue moot by the spring. But does anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black America to win a primary?

A race-tinged brawl at the convention, some nine weeks before Election Day, will not be a Hallmark moment. As Mr. Wilkins reiterated to me last week, it will be a flashback to the Democratic civil war of 1968, a suicide for the party no matter which victor ends up holding the rancid spoils.

I know we're only talking 24 delegates here but Clinton really needs to start holding Obama to smaller margins in these sacrifice states. If not, she'll have to win all her own strong states with blowouts too to stay in the race. I just saw in the Washington Post that Solis-Doyle is stepping down as her campaign manager and someone named Maggie Williams is taking over, so they may be thinking the same thing I'm thinking.

February is

"a month that's shaping up as a very dark one indeed for Hillary,"

with electoral outcomes that are

"signaling a dark stretch ahead for the Hillary Camp."

I find this language striking -- it reminds me of the scene in the movie Malcolm X., where the Black Muslim shows Malcolm the definition of the word "Black" in the dictionary. One of them reads through the negative associations, and a light bulb is supposed to go off in all our heads.

It also reminds me of the days when people would, quite self righteously, defend their use of the word "he" when ostensibly discussing an individual generic person. The common usage of "he or she" today is one of feminism's little victories.