"Indiana Is the New Texas"

and the New Republic is the Old Republic.

The goal post keep changing. I wish her and her people would keep their mouth shut as far as when they plan on withdrawing. Hilary will NOT withdraw from this race the Superdelegates are going to have to come out and put an end to it. So they need to stop with the platitudes about withdrawing from the race cause its NOT going to happen. LOL I think it was SNL that had a skit with Obama in the White House and Hilary still in the Presidential race.

But hey I dont mind her staying in the race I think she does Obama a service by helping him. Obama is not use to being attacked by the opponent in politics. So I'm grateful to Hilary for vetting him too bad she herself is not vetted since every week there is a new lie about her coming out. The latest being the Bosnia Mispoke.

Carol

If Indiana is the new Texas, it is only because the Clinton's have accepted that North Carolina is the new South Carolina.  If that is the case, and Obama gets a double digit win in NC, Clinton is in the ditch no matter what happens in Indiana.  It is a race of the mind now, not of reality.

I have said it before, if Hillary were to run a Huckabee type campaign and stay away from such idiocies as "He is not a Constitutional Law Professor, he is a Constitutional Senior Lecturer who is referred to as a Professor by everyone but on paper in the fine print he isn't actually one so he is a liar" type nonsense it would be a service to the party, and she would also have the opportunity to make a case after the voting is done to the sd's. The best way to win her case is to win the remaining contests well, in an affirmative sense and not from tearing Obama down, which would just make her even more hated than now.

arsenal you are correct. Except that "Clintons" as a plural does not involve an apostrophe. I don't mean to be nitpicky except that yes I do. I care. I see people do this so much that I think it's not a typo, it's a mental virus of badness that is spreading. And I mean no disrespect - I would want the same pointed out to me. Each one teach one, and all that. It takes a village!

Obama may be doing well in Indiana now, but the gap should close a bit after the media starts beaming out another manufactured "comeback kid" narrative following Clinton's victory in Pennsylvania.

God, I hate the way the media has covered this election. In a few weeks, we went from:

* Clinton needs blowout wins in Ohio and Texas to close the pledged delegate gap . . . to

* Clinton needs decisive wins in Ohio and Texas for, er, symbolic reasons . . . to

* Clinton's narrow popular vote win in Texas (combined with a delegate loss), after leading by 20 points in the polls, proves that she is on the comeback trail!

We'll see it all over again with Pennsylvania.

I've heard several times in the last few weeks that "she needs to beat him by 20+ points" there. (Why? Will she have a better chance of winning the nomination with a 20+ win? 20, 30, or 10 -- what does it matter? She's lost the pledged delegate count no matter what.) But I guarantee that, when Clinton ekes out a 5- or 10-point win, the narrative will be that Obama is in grave danger, that he is suddenly "unelectable," and -- worst of all -- that he has dark skin. (Not as dark, admittedly, as it would likely be if both of his parents were of African descent -- but still worryingly dark. I also expect, after Pennsylvania, to see TNR blog items with titles like "Why the Wright Controversy [i.e., why Obama's blackness] Dooms His Candidacy.")

Clinton's amazing comeback win in Pennsylvania will then spur her to a narrow win in Indiana -- and possibly also in Oregon, where limited polling now shows her with a large lead that has mostly gone unreported.

This is my fear, anyway.

One thing you can take to the bank, meanwhile, is that West Virginia will provide Clinton's third 20+ margin. (To offset the doom and gloom, I have a feeling that Obama will win by more than 20 in North Carolina. But that vote won't matter -- because of the voters' blackness, natch.)

I have said it before, if Hillary were to run a Huckabee type campaign and stay away from such idiocies as "He is not a Constitutional Law Professor, he is a Constitutional Senior Lecturer who is referred to as a Professor by everyone but on paper in the fine print he isn't actually one so he is a liar" type nonsense it would be a service to the party, and she would also have the opportunity to make a case after the voting is done to the sd's. The best way to win her case is to win the remaining contests well, in an affirmative sense and not from tearing Obama down, which would just make her even more hated than now.

The whole race, it's felt like Team Hillary has been focused on just a handful of states. "These are the states we think we can win," they say, "So these are the only states we'll really try to compete in, and since they're the states we intend to compete in, they're the only states that should matter." Then, to their credit, they often do win the one or two states they actually bother to try to win, but the other guy wins all the other states, and they're just mystified at how they're not just given the nomination by acclimation. "But we won all the states we decided it was worth winning. Who the f--- cares if the other guy won all the other states, and also got half the delegates from the states we won?"

As if Team Hillary's estimation of which states are worth trying to win should determine how the nomination is decided.

Which, fine -- if a campaign wants to be that stupid, go for it. That kind of idiot strategy helped America dodge the bullet of a Giuliani presidency, so it's not necessarily a bad thing for some candidates to adopt a deliberate strategy of losing his or her way to the nomination. But it would be dangerous for a party to actually nominate someone with that sort of strategic myopy; the Electoral College is a harsh mistress, and Virginia's 13 electoral votes count whether you think Virginia "matters" or not.

Which is all by way of saying, I don't care what Hillary's "expectations" are. She isn't winning, has never been winning, and isn't going to win, and nothing she says about which states "matter" is going to change the reality of the situation.

blackton if she could tear him down legitimately, that would be ok. If she really sees herself as the Cassandra that everyone had better listen to, then fine, but it's the fact that she uses arguments she doesn't even believe herself, opportunistically, in the hopes that somebody else thinks Obama's a muslim, a liar, a tolerator of hate speech, or whatever, that shows she isn't doing this to save her country.

Ok: to all of you who think she is performing a valuable service to Obama by "sparring" with him now to prepare him for the general : Bad analogy! A sparring partner doesn't try to knock you out, or punch you in the kidney so you can't walk, much less fight, in the big match. The fact that she hasn't landed any knock out punches, or hurt anybody but herself, is not for lack of trying, but a function of her incompetence and his ability to defend himself. And it may not critically wound him because of that, but the idea that this process makes him stronger is nuts. This isn't happening in some back room, where she is being devil's advocate, this is happening in front of the whole country, and voters are watching. If the voter's perception of him is being chipped away at by her packet of lies, this is how he'd lose in November. Death by a thousand cuts. It's not sparring.

if she could tear him down legitimately, that would be ok. yeah, I agree. I have no problem with highlighting the differences in Health care, nor do I have any problem with the 3 AM ad, (excepting that it plays right into McCains hand). At this point, I just don't know how she can tear him down legitimately.

and you are right about the thousand cuts. Huckabee kept McCain in the news giving McCain a chance to give a speech the same night as Obama and Clinton did, now after Pa. it will only be Clinton and Obama.

Unfortunately, it will be Clinton that night and she will crow as though she had just won the White House.

if she could tear him down legitimately, that would be ok. yeah, I agree. I have no problem with highlighting the differences in Health care, nor do I have any problem with the 3 AM ad, (excepting that it plays right into McCains hand). At this point, I just don't know how she can tear him down legitimately.

and you are right about the thousand cuts. Huckabee kept McCain in the news giving McCain a chance to give a speech the same night as Obama and Clinton did, now after Pa. it will only be Clinton and Obama.

Unfortunately, it will be Clinton that night and she will crow as though she had just won the White House.

So it comes back to the point I've making for weeks now.  She can't win back the nomination.  She can and does hurt Obama in the way she is running.  So why is she doing it?  To assure he loses in November so she can say:  "I told you so" in 2012.

But she is also hurting herself badly with the future of the party... so the question becomes how short will those memories be and how much will HRC be blamed for any loss in the General, assuming Obama does lose.

The core of HRC's constituency will never vote for Obama and never was going to BECAUSE he is a black man.  I just was doing registrations in Northern Indiana... Oh my oh my... are they ever a sour, scared bunch.

The question is are there enough new voters who can offset that inevitable defection in November.

Hungarian, you're exactly right. She has a lot of institutional advantages in PA and started her campaign there with a 17 point lead. If she ends up wining by 5, it will in no way be a "comebacK' but will be spun that way.

First and foremost, HRC cannot win the nomination unless a real act of God occurs.  If the Superdelegates somehow conspire to give it to her, the Dem. party will be mortally injured for many years to come and McCain will win.  She's got too large an ego and is too hard headed to gracefully bow out, and I really think this will cause her and Bill to become ostracized by the party due to the damage they'll cause.  If she continues as she has, getting more and more desperate, she only lessens Obama's chance of winning.  She won't be able to say 'I told you so . . .' if he looses - she'll have to start up her own party!