Pretty effective at tying McCain to Bush, I think:
But this year’s Republican primary was a contest to see which candidate could out-Bush the other, and that is the contest John McCain won. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans that once bothered Senator McCain’s conscience are now his only economic policy. The Bush health care plan that only helps those who are already healthy and wealthy is now John McCain’s answer to the 47 million Americans without insurance and the millions more who can’t pay their medical bills. The Bush Iraq policy that asks everything of our troops and nothing of Iraqi politicians is John McCain’s policy too, and so is the fear of tough and aggressive diplomacy that has left this country more isolated and less secure than at any time in recent history. The lobbyists who ruled George Bush’s Washington are now running John McCain’s campaign, and they actually had the nerve to say that the American people won’t care about this. Talk about out of touch!
I will leave it up to Senator McCain to explain to the American people whether his policies and positions represent long-held convictions or Washington calculations, but the one thing they don’t represent is change.
Relatedly, I know there's some debate about whether Obama should have sorta proclaimed victory tonight by announcing he had a majority of pledged delegates. I'm basically agnostic on this question--on the one hand, it steps on Hillary's Kentucky headline, which is a plus for him; on the other, it risks alienating Hillary supporters, which is a minus; back on the first hand, he was extremely gracious and complimentary toward her.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that this is just the logical conclusion of the entire Obama primary strategy, which was to obsess over pledged delegates to the exclusion of all other metrics. Since New Hampshire, the Obama people have been talking about pledged delegates, pledged delegates, pledged delegates while the Clinton people have changed their preferred metric every few days. There's no question that this consistency helped the Obama campaign make its case to the media and to superdelegates. And so it's only natural that, having won on the terms they've been pushing non-stop for four months, they would declare victory.
--Noam Scheiber