Flying Pink Unicorns

Oops. I was completely, absolutely and utterly WRONG about Hillary. Please post any and all mocking, laughing comments in this post, not in any others. Kick me. Make fun of me. Ask why you should bother reading my blog. Insert red face here.

Clinton won Texas narrowly and absolutely cleaned Obama's clock in the small, obscure, and utterly unimportant state of, um, Ohio. Oops.

What a stunning comeback for the comeback Queen. What a stunning margin of victory in Ohio. Hey, they stayed on one message, muzzled Bill, and attacked Obama. I think they have stumbled upon a winning formula, and just in the nick of time. Get ready for weeks and weeks of partially negative campaigning. Oh joy!

Even if my prediction was reasonable when I wrote it, and it may well have been, I didn't even begin to see how much the campaign changed in the last week. Hill finally had a really good week, and questions finally began to really hit Obama hard. In Ohio both candidates were insincerely campaigning on reforming or ending NAFTA (which wouldn't save a single job, literally, as I said a few days ago). However, one of Obama's staffers was caught having in essence told a Canadian consular official, don't worry about the silly things Obama is saying, this is just politics, we won't disturb NAFTA. When confronted about it, Obama's people said the meeting didn't happen. Obama himself said the meeting did happen. Well, the Canadian consular official wrote a memo, leaked of course, about the meeting. Then the Obama people lied, then they stopped lying and started spinning. All in all not an optimal situation for the "above politics candidate."

Texas was close, but Hill's huge lead among Hispanics was dispositive, from what I have seen.

So where does the campaign go from here? I'll write more on this, but the short answer is, "how the heck should I know?" It is EASY to see how this could go all the way to the convention, in late August in Colorado. Obama's lead in pledged delegates is slightly under 100 at the moment. The most likely scenario is that at the end of all the primaries and caucuses he has a small lead. There is also the issue of what to do about Michigan (where no one campaigned and where Obama's name wasn't on the ballot) and Florida (where no one campaigned, both names were on the ballot, and Hillary kicked Obama's arse). There is just no way either state's delegates will count as is, but there is a real possibility of a re vote in either or both states. None of which changes the fact that neither of them are likely to be able to come real close to the magic # of delegates needed for nomination without a lot of help from superdelegates. So it seems to me that this campaign is no longer about delegates alone, but is also very much about superdelegates, and public relations.