As more polls come out showing that Obama has a much better chance of beating McCain, Obama’s campaign will be able to convince more super delegates to come to their side.
He shouldn’t have a hard time convincing red state politicians. They’re terrified of having Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket.
The New York Times concludes that Obama’s drug use was not very extensive.
Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.
In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.
They’re both liberal, but as Andrew Sullivan explains, they take very different approaches to solving problems:
Obama is the more pragmatic and centrist of the two on this matter. The notion that he is the more liberal of the two is not a very enlightening analysis. In general, they represent different strands of liberalism, and it’s reflected in their campaign rhetoric. Obama tends to emphasize people’s ability to help themselves and their capacity to do so independently of government. Clinton tends to emphasize the neediness of people for government support and help, and she’s much more comfortable with coercive government action.
It’s “Yes, We Can,” vs “I’ll Take Care Of You.”
And that’s why a simplistic Obama-is-a-leftist critique won’t work as well as some seem to think. He’s a liberal, but a reconstructed one. He’s the kind of liberal who sees dependency as a problem not a solution. And he’s not a statist in the way previous liberal generations have been. He actually listened to and absorbed some of the conservative critique of liberalism these past two decades. And he has changed not just to protect his right flank.
These silly games about challenging Obama to debates and then trying to get favorable headlines when Obama refuses to alter his own schedule are so pathetic.
Clinton is desperate to win Maine, so she’s resorting to these lame tactics.
Over 2 million votes were cast in California before Super Tuesday, so Obama’s surge over the past couple of weeks was blunted by the fact that many voters had already voted. George Will explains:
Obama’s achievements on Tuesday would have been considered astonishing just two weeks ago, but they have been partially discounted because the strength of his ascendancy became so apparent in advance. And he would have taken an even larger stride toward the nomination were it not for a novelty that advanced thinkers have inflicted on the political process.
Once upon a time, in an America now consigned to the mists of memory, there was a quaint and, it is now said, oppressive custom called Election Day. This great national coming together of the public in public polling places, this rare communitarian moment in a nation of restless individualists, was an exhilarating episode in our civic liturgy. Then came, in the name of progress, the plague of early voting.
In many states, voting extends over weeks, beginning before campaigns reach their informative crescendos. This plague has been encouraged by people, often Democrats, who insist, without much supporting evidence, that it increases voter turnout, especially among minorities and workers for whom the challenge of getting to polling places on a particular day is supposedly too burdensome.
The plague made many Super Tuesday voters — those who hurried to cast their ballots for John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani and other dear departeds — feel like ninnies, which serves them right. On Tuesday, the Democratic Party paid a price for early voting, especially in California, where more than 2 million votes were cast in the 29 days prior to what is anachronistically called Election Day. The price was paid by the party’s most potentially potent nominee, Obama, whose surge became apparent after many impatient voters had already rushed to judgment.
Although Obama lost California to Clinton by 380,000 votes, he surely ran much closer in the votes cast on Tuesday, after her double-digit lead in polls had evaporated. Had he won the third of the three C’s — he won Connecticut, where a large portion of voters are in her New York City media market, and in Colorado, a red Western state rapidly turning purple — he might now be unstoppable.
What’s amzing to me is that all the talking heads on TV rarely mention theis fact when discussing the results from California. Dan Abrams on MSNBC was making a big deal of how “the polls” were wrong in California, though he didn’t address the early voting issue and he only cited the one poll (Zogby) that was outside of what most of the other polls were showing. It makes you wonder if these guys put any real thought into their programs.
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