It’s time to review the election-within-an-election that we’ve been witnessing over the past month and a half.
When we first started down the road to tomorrow’s Pennsylvania primary six weeks ago, Hillary Clinton was still holding on to the huge lead that earlier polls had shown. More importantly, in the immediate aftermath of the Clinton’s strong victory in Ohio, it was assumed that she’d have a strong advantage in the Keystone State due to it’s many similarities, at least economically, to it’s neighbor to the West. And, in fact, Clinton did get a significant bounce out of her TexOhio wins, erasing the momentum that Obama had built up in Pennsylvania in February.
Given all of that, it was clear that Barack Obama had his work cut out for him if he was to stand any chance of winning in Pennsylvania. And things couldn’t have gotten off to a worse start. Less than a week after TexOhio, the Jeremiah Wright story, which had been percolating in the blogs and talk radio for months, broke in the mainstream media, complete with video. Notwithstanding his Philadelphia speech, it been fairly clear fairly quickly that the story had hurt Obama in the polls.
With a little more than a month to go, Barack Obama continued to trail Hillary Clinton in the polls.
Then, Barack got a stroke of good luck.
And it came in the form of Hillary Clinton’s audacious and provably false lies about her 1996 trip to Bosnia as First Lady and about her position on the Iraq War back in 2003.
As a result, Obama started to close the gap against Hillary, to the point where her lead was statistically insignificant.
Then Barack Obama uttered these famous words:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
The results was a firestorm, that Clinton exploited and exploited and exploited and exploited.
As a result, Clinton has regained a lead that, if it holds would give her an argument for staying in the race for two more weeks.
This much seems clear, but-for Bittergate, and assuming that Obama otherwise would have stayed on message in the final two weeks, we would likely be talking this afternoon about the possibility that Obama could end the campaign tomorrow by beating Hillary. Now, that looks like an extremely unlikely outcome.
April 21st, 2008 at 1:25 pm
“And, in fact, Clinton did get a significant bounce out of her TexOhio wins”
I’m still not sure what spell Clinton has cast over the media and the country at large to convince them that she won Texas, but I find it baffling, unless they’re going by some standard other than number of delegates won.