A Response To Allen and VandeHei

[metta 0]

article on the status of the Race for nomination

That there’s a consensus that OBama will win the nomination because of this strategic back-and-forth should throw itself up as a caution to VandeHei and Allen – perhaps the news business, by closing the books on 2008 so early, will magnify and distort, rather than reflect, the level of Obama’s support. What has yet to be decided – and what the media will not, thankfully, decide – is how. Will he win it with a strong majority of the popular vote? Probably not. A strong majority of earned delegates? (likely—but something we really had no way of knowing until last week, when momentum for new primaries in Michigan and Florida died.) What does Barack Obama’s demographic coalition look like? Why are so many Democrats voting against him? Why are so many Democrats voting for Hillary Clinton?

The “10 percent” that the Clinton adviser is hanging onto is premised on the unlikely event that that some fatal flaw will be discovered about Barack Obama. Perhaps he has a second family living in Idaho… that type of thing. The authors dismiss this as silly. Surely it is not an argument. But it’s not dumb. Two weeks of discussing Obama’s relationship to Rev. Jeremiah Wright has pushed Obama’s net favorability ratings down and did indeed freeze, the superdelegates. Obama’s negatives in some of the robot polling are above 50% now.

Since this is verging on 1,500 words now, let me just end with a thought about the party elders. John Edwards, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid – if these folks came together and threw their weight behind the nominee, Hillary Clinton would probably drop out by the end of the week. But the party elders have in some cases explicitly abstained from making such a determination because in their minds, the racetrack is open and horses, to beat that metaphor to death, are still trotting around.

Edited March 25, 2008 by metta