Blogging on Meds

One very happy soon-to-be nominee…

Last night Barack Obama effectively ended Hillary Clinton’s chances for the nomination. By winning NC by wider margins than expected and keeping IN close, Obama added delegates and popular votes to his already substantial lead. Now it’s just a question of how Hillary handle defeat. She’ll likely run her campaign to the end, and try to seat FL and MI’s delegates, but the pressure from within the Party may prove too much. Here’s a press wrap-up….

Boston Globe Editorial:

Obama’s Back
May 6, 2008
Tuesday’s primaries in North Carolina and Indiana were only the latest in a string of supposedly climactic contests that would settle the Democratic presidential nomination. The evening didn’t quite live up to its billing, but for frontrunner Barack Obama the results were almost as good. He won big in North Carolina. Hillary Clinton appears to have won Indiana, but by a much narrower margin than expected.

More to the point, Obama will surely extend his significant lead in pledged delegates. Clinton — once the prohibitive favorite — almost surely cannot overturn that lead. And she will be hard-pressed to convince unelected superdelegates why they should do for her what she cannot.

Obama knows this. And in his speech in Raleigh, N.C., he sought to begin the process of uniting his party — and, he clearly hopes, the nation — behind him. “I love this country too much,” he said, “to see this country distracted and divided at this point in its history.”

In Indianapolis, Clinton vowed to fight on “full speed on to the White House” On cable news channels, her surrogates sketched out ever more farfetched scenarios by which she could prevail. But time is running short, as is the list of states that have yet to vote. The Democratic Party doesn’t have a nominee yet, but the end of the fight is much closer after North Carolina and Indiana.

CNN: Carl Bernstein said two Hillary advisers had told him she would try for the vice presidency.

LAT says Clinton may try and extend process:

Tuesday’s voting in Indiana and North Carolina put Hillary Rodham Clinton no closer to overtaking Barack Obama on the path to the Democratic presidential nomination. That now leaves Clinton with one overriding task: to make the path longer.

For most of the year, June 3 beckoned as the end of an exhausting nominating calendar, the day that the final states hold primaries to choose between Clinton and Obama. But now, Clinton is preparing to push the contest beyond the voting phase of the process and into the realm of committee meetings and credentialing rules, where her campaign believes she may have a chance to overtake Obama before the party’s nominating convention in late August.

John Heilerman in NY Mag, always a great read, continues his Hertzbergian 2008 run:

Beyond the eradication of any momentum that had lately accrued to Clinton, the effect of Obama’s showing was threefold. First, it handed at least five more pledged delegates to the hopemonger, enhancing his already formidable lead in that department. Second, the shellacking he administered in North Carolina erased the roughly 200,000 popular-vote gain scored by Clinton in Pennsylvania — thus making it all but inevitable that she will fail to catch him in that category, even in the unlikely event that Florida and Michigan are counted. And third, it undermined significantly the notion that Obama is irreparably damaged goods, a candidate too elitist, too secular, and maybe just too black to be elected in the fall. Indeed, though the exit polls contained some good news for her, there were an equal number of reassuring signs to which he and his people can point.

Given all this, it’s hardly surprising that the media consensus is that, for all intents and purposes, Obama is now the Democratic nominee. (Both Tim Russert and Matt Drudge had flatly declared this to be the case by close of business last night.) Throughout this campaign, of course, almost every media consensus that’s emerged has quickly been blown to pieces. But this time, I suspect, barring some catastrophic Obama blowup — photographic evidence of a ménage à trois featuring the candidate, Wright, and Bill Ayers, perhaps? — the consensus will prove correct.

The question now is when and how Clinton will leave the race. Those seeking affirmation that Clinton and her people understand that it is over are grasping at thin straws: the fact that she canceled her appearances on the morning shows today; that the fundraising e-mail her campaign dispatched last night did not contain an actual solicitation for, er, funds. Those who fear that she will pursue a scorched-earth campaign to the bitter end, on the other hand, will note that she is heading to West Virginia today and South Dakota tomorrow — both sites of upcoming contests.

And, who knows, maybe she is completely deluded. Maybe she still thinks she can win. But whatever else can be said of Hillary Clinton, she is no fool. My gut says that although she may not quit until June, everything that happens from this point on is sheer choreography, the orchestration of her exit — on her terms. Her good-bye may be long or it may be short, but a good-bye it will be. She hasn’t left the building yet, but we soon may see her taking up residence in the departure lounge