comment #1

Josh Massey says ...

"Republicans like Sen. Barack Obama nearly as much as they like Sen. John McCain,..."

In other words, not at all.

comment #2

BurmaShave says ...

Exxxxxcellent point.

comment #3

gansibele says ...

Damn funny, Massey. And true.

comment #4

le corbeau says ...

No doubt to Jeff's bitter, misanthropic regret, Hillary appears to have saved her own bacon for another day. Jonathan Alter has a piece in Newsweek in which he demonstrates that even with a string of wins from here on out, she can't get a numerical lead over Obama by the time they run out of states. But Alter seems oddly blind to the real point, which is that NEITHER of them can get the 2025 needed for a first-ballot win.

The talk has been that the superdelegates wouldn't overrule the will of the people. But that's nonsense; the whole point of the convention is that the will of the people is expressed in the first ballot, and if it's not decisive, then anything can happen. What saves the superdelegates from the charge of doing Queen Hillary's evil bidding and killing Obambi is the very process of letting the first ballot go through with no winner. After that, they're free to do as they please, and that's when I think it will matter very much who wins these last remaining primaries, because momentum and victory in big competitive states will be a compelling argument for Hillary. If Clintonoids came to you and said we have nearly as many votes, we won the states that matter most, we're on a hot streak now and finally have our message working, and he's young, he can run again in 2012 or 2016 and he'll be a stronger, more experienced candidate by then, you'd have a hard time saying no to that.

comment #5

D.Z. says ...

Mgmax: Those states matter, but they don't matter the most. Look at Kerry and Gore.

comment #6

LFF says ...

"If Clintonoids came to you and said we have nearly as many votes, we won the states that matter most, we're on a hot streak now and finally have our message working, and he's young, he can run again in 2012 or 2016 and he'll be a stronger, more experienced candidate by then, you'd have a hard time saying no to that"

It wont get to that point. Clinton is going to perform every piece of character assassination over the next 5 weeks. Even if she ultimately wrests it away from him, the lasting damage from that will hurt him in any future run. You know its coming. Its going to be criminal corruption, anti-american, gay, drug addict, greedy, idiocy ... who knows what else. all lies of course, but Ohio proves that the uneducated believe the attacks.

comment #7

Dzayson says ...

Obama, as the clear odds-on favorite, should have finished Mrs. Bill off today. But he didn't, and the momentum is shifting back. I remember watching a big football game a few weeks back where the sexy, confident favorite got outmuscled by the underdog at the last second. I think something similar is happening here.

Then again, in the fall of 2004, I felt like if the Boston Red Sox could win the World Series, then perhaps another Boston victory would ensue several days later. So much for my sports/politics correlation. Fuck.

comment #8

D.Z. says ...

He put up a good fight, and kept her from winning by a landslide there. That's all that mattered. \

comment #9

nemo says ...

I didn't see Tina Fey's SNL sketch. When Jeff Wells said it more or less endorsed HRC, I thought it was just another example of his hostility to anything less than an endorsement of his own favorite candidate.

Well, lo and behold, the NY Times itself says pretty much exactly what Wells what saying -- that SNL scored the media for going easy on Obama, favoring him over HRC, and that the media responded by flipping the tone of their coverage in the last two weeks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/us/politics/05press.html?hp

The article also attributed the change to HRC and her staff "practically browbeating reporters." It says that more recent coverage has suggested that "Mr. Obama was on the ropes and that Mrs. Clinton’s camp had been reinvigorated."

The article quotes Obama himself saying that "he believed that reporters had been influenced by the Clinton campaign’s flood of complaints about news media bias."

There is a certain amount of media navel-gazing in this article, typical among reporters in the elite media who tend to believe that they decide the election.

The biggest problem with this article is that it's written by Katherine Seelye, a Times reporter who herself is famous for her gentle and unquestioning softball coverage of George W. Bush during his 2000 and 2004 campaigns, and her subtly contemptuous coverage of his opponents. Just search on "seelye" at dailyhowler.com.

comment #10

le corbeau says ...

Uh... yeah.

The rightwing, pro-Bush New York Times.

How is life in the Purple Dimension treating you?

comment #11

nemo says ...

The Times often feels it has to bend over backwards to avoid the charge of being liberal. So they hire soft propagandists such as Brooks and hard propagandists such as Kristol. So they protect closet propagandists such as Judith Miller.

Frank Bruni, the Times main reporter covering the Bush side of the 2000 campaign, was always at pains to prove what a regular guy he was by going soft on Bush. Frank Bruni is not a regular guy, he's a top NY Times reporter, but he sure wanted to be a regular guy when he was on the plane with Bush.

Bruni's counterpart on the Gore side, Seelye, rolled her eyes in print every time Gore tried to raise money or talk policy.

The Times would be a better paper if they would just accept that they are a liberal paper. But they keep trying to prove they're not. It's embarrassing, like watching a nerd try to prove he can be pals with the football jocks.

The Kit Seelye story is all about the fragile egos of the news media, and how susceptible they are to spin, whether that spin is coming from Karl Rove or from HRC's Mark Penn.

comment #12

le corbeau says ...

Interesting that you effectively concede that they are very liberal by portraying it as a subterfuge to hire a few slight-righties to cover their tracks.

Anyway, later today I'm sure we'll have plenty of bile from Jeff, but the fact is, Obama was a lousy candidate for the last week or so and he got his comeuppance by a public which, understandably, does not want the press making its choices for it. How he handles it in the remaining weeks will tell us if he's really got "some sand in him," as Lee Marvin puts it in Bad Day at Black Rock, or if it was just a spring fling. He's generally been a fast learner; I don't count him out by any means. But it's good to see someone being tested on the way to his anointment.

comment #13

nemo says ...

By the way, the Wall Street Journal is my daily paper, not the NY Times. The WSJ is the better paper of the two.

Of course, the Journal has that schizoid thing going on. Their news coverage is top-notch, but their Op-Ed pages are pure rich-guy right-wing fantasy land.

The WSJ serves their readership in conflicting dual roles -- reality in the news pages, fantasy in the Op-Ed pages. Mercifully the WSJ doesn't indulge in the NY Times' pathetic desire to be liked by everyone.

comment #14

nemo says ...

Hey, I more than effectively concede the NY Times is liberal. It's clear they're liberal. I wish they would get over being ashamed of that fact. The WSJ isn't ashamed of being on the right, and it doesn't interfere with their doing a fine job in their news coverage.

I'll concede that Brooks is a slight rightie. In fact, he's a perfect fit for the Times. Brooks wants to be liked by liberals, and the Times wants to be liked by conservatives. They're a match made in heaven.

But William "The Bloody" Kristol? There's nothing "slightly" right wing about him.

I wouldn't mind who the Times hired for their Op-Ed pieces, including the vapid Maureen Dowd, if only their self-contempt didn't infect their political coverage.

The Times business reporters are unbelievably better than their political reporters.

comment #15

christian says ...

"The rightwing, pro-Bush New York Times."

Ask Judith Miller or Bill Kristol about that...

And once again, it's great to watch the moron media masses try to determine "wha' happened?" It wasn't the negative ads, which Clinton could barely afford to put on in Ohio and Texas.

Guess what? Some people have been planning to vote for Clinton for a long time. And despite the fact that folks like Jeff and others in the MSM want Obama has nothing to do with the ground reality. Deal.

comment #16

nemo says ...

We will see whether Obama has some sand in him. Even though it's the closest primary race in a very, very long time, Obama has had a relatively easy time of it. He seems to have the luck of facing opponents who self-destruct. First Jeri Ryan's ex-husband, whatzisname. Then Alan Keyes, ferchrissakes.

When it turned out that HRC's campaign had failed to budget for the unlikely even of a race beyond Super Tuesday, it began to look like the mighty Clinton machine was about to self-destruct as well before the mighty luck of Obama.

It's good he's not taking this in a walk, and neither is Hillary, whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be. The GOP may be seriously wounded this time around, but they won't lie down and die the way they did in Illinois when Obama strolled into the Senate.

Both Katherine Seelye in today's article and Maureen Dowd recently talked as if Hillary Clinton's continued survival depends entirely on the media's perception of her. The media has a lot of influence, but she's still in the running because she's got a lot of delegates and no Democrat has enough delegates to win yet.

comment #17

christian says ...

The corporate MSM is the present enemy of democracy.

They have injected themselves into the equation beyond all rationality, and their stories now revolve around their predictions and their pronouncements. "Gut level thinkers" like Chris Matthews comes to mind, who all but declared McCain the front-runner the other night.

comment #18

Josh Massey says ...

People who continue to insist we are a democracy are the present enemy of this constitutional republic.

comment #19

christian says ...

As are people willing to let themselves be subjugated by the elites in charge.

comment #20

D.Z. says ...

nemo: "Well, lo and behold, the NY Times itself says pretty much exactly what Wells what saying -- that SNL scored the media for going easy on Obama, favoring him over HRC,"

And Rush Limbaugh claimed the media went "easy" on black football players.

'It says that more recent coverage has suggested that "Mr. Obama was on the ropes and that Mrs. Clinton’s camp had been reinvigorated."'

He's only on the ropes when she gets more delegates than him.

'The article quotes Obama himself saying that "he believed that reporters had been influenced by the Clinton campaign’s flood of complaints about news media bias."'

In other words, she promises to do more exclusives, if they take pot-shots at him.

"By the way, the Wall Street Journal is my daily paper, not the NY Times. The WSJ is the better paper of the two."

How can a newspaper which encouraged the kind of investment which led to the tech bubble and the housing crisis be "better", exactly?

Mgmax: "Interesting that you effectively concede that they are very liberal by portraying it as a subterfuge to hire a few slight-righties to cover their tracks."

I imagine it's more like the fact that Republicunts won't read anything which isn't written by one of their zombies, regardless of "liberal bias".

comment #21

le corbeau says ...

Yes, I'm sure you do imagine that.

I just came from reading a sharp little piece about the new Kazuo Ishiguro novel at National Review Online, you go on imagining what you want.

comment #22

D.Z. says ...

"I just came from reading a sharp little piece about the new Kazuo Ishiguro novel at National Review Online, you go on imagining what you want."

National Review=I rest my case.