Moving Forward

After about five and a half hours of this now, I've finally thrown the TV on mute. This will be my 16th and final entry of the night, and I'm a little exhausted. I wish I could say that tonight was like Super Tuesday and that in the end, it didn't settle a damned thing. And in a way, that's true. Obama will likely maintain his delegate lead, if slightly smaller. Chuck Todd has Vermont and Rhode Island canceling each other out, and while Clinton could potentially pick up close to 10 delegates in Ohio but Obama may actually pick up a few net delegates in Texas. The math has not gotten any better for Clinton,* but it still remains unfavorable, and she's got to start winning big margins. The difference is almost entirely psychological. With a couple of good victories tonight, Obama could have put this down and we could have gotten on with a two-candidate race. Right now he's sitting on his February fundraising numbers and his 50 superdelegates to be announced which he hopes will change the hype pretty quickly, but there is no question that this was a setback.

So what do we see in the next six weeks?

Hillary Clinton will ride this wave of good news for about a week or so, talking all positive, beaming with pride, and milking her comeback story for all it's worth. She will do everything she can to attach her reputation to her husband's so she can take the economic issue as far as it will go. When the delegate totals start to catch up with her again, and after Obama wins in Wyoming and Mississippi, she'll go back into attack mode, and we'll have five weeks of that going into Pennsylvania. Then she'll start going on a crusade to get new elections in Florida and Michigan, which would likely be in June and make it a brutal, bitter war of attrition which would be colossally bad for the party, and undo all of the positive enthusiasm built up by the wealth of excellent candidates the DNC offered his year.

Barack Obama will emphasize the delegate totals, and if he's smart, will really get on the economic message as hard as he can. He needs to undo the NAFTA damage, but he needs to do it in a way that puts him in a race against McCain and not against Clinton. He needs to figure out a way to rebut any charges she makes without engaging her directly. What I think we'll see then is an attempt to beat Clinton at her own game: it's said that the only way she can win is by way of the "smoke-filled room," by cutting deals with superdelegates. Her disadvantage there is that Obama has the delegate advantage, so he has the opportunity to start playing to that crowd before she does. If he starts meeting privately with unpledged delegates and making his case for party unity, for attacking McCain directly and inflating his delegate margin, they can start taking Hillary down for him, and he can essentially make Pennsylvania irrelevant. But he has to work that very carefully so it's clear that he's amplifying the vote results, not overriding them.

MSNBC has just called Texas for Clinton, but only by the slimmest of margins, and that's not counting the caucus results, which probably won't be complete until this weekend or later.

The winner tonight is John McCain. The entire Democratic Party just lost: not because Hillary Clinton won, but because the entire primary campaign still has not been decisively won. Right now, two planes are circling over one runway, and each is waiting for the other to run out of fuel and crash so that it can land. Meanwhile, the people on board are out of peanuts, they're trying to get their ears to pop and they've gotten real bored with those Sky Mall catalogs.

That's about as much as I can manage tonight. G'night folks.

*In fact, the math may have gotten much, much worse for Clinton tonight. Let's round this into numbers that are easier to work with. Before tonight, Obama had maybe a 100 delegate lead over Hillary Clinton, with about 1400 delegates left to be chosen/announced for a candidate. After tonight, Clinton only has to find 90 more delegates (to tie him) relative to what he takes, but she only has 1000 more delegates to pull from. With every state she has to battle for, she's got a smaller and smaller pool of potential delegates to draw on that she has to win a larger and larger share of to overcome the gap between them. I don't want to get into it too much, because mathematical analysis isn't my strong suit, but as far as I can see, all tonight did was enable the continuation of a battle whose end will not likely be changed.