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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

And Hillary gets her 10 point margin.

Did we not all agree that the game would be transformed if she hit that mark?

WaPo puts it this way:
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Pennsylvania presidential primary decisively on Tuesday night, running up a 10-percentage-point victory that bolstered her case for staying in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Sen. Barack Obama played down a defeat that did not substantially reduce his delegate lead....
The NYT front page displays the percentages as 54.7% and 45.3%, using decimals to deprive the feisty candidate of the 2-digit lead that means so much. The lead article, by Adam Nagourney, frames it this way:
For better or worse — and many Democrats fear it is for worse — the race goes on.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton defeated Senator Barack Obama in Pennsylvania on Tuesday by enough of a margin to continue a battle that Democrats increasingly believe is undermining their effort to unify the party and prepare for the general election against Senator John McCain.

Despite a huge investment of time and money by Mr. Obama and pressure on Mrs. Clinton by the party establishment to consider folding her campaign, she won her third big state in a row. Mrs. Clinton showed again that she is a tenacious campaigner with an ability to connect with the blue-collar voters Mr. Obama has found elusive and who could be critical to a Democratic victory in November.

Mrs. Clinton’s margin was probably not sufficient to fundamentally alter the dynamics of the race, which continued to favor an eventual victory for Mr. Obama. But it made clear that the contest will go on at least a few weeks, if not more. And it served to underline the concerns about Mr. Obama’s strengths as a general election candidate. Exit polls again highlighted the racial, economic, sex and values divisions within the party.
The news is not that she won big, but that it's bad that she won.

ADDED: Here's the Wall Street Journal editorial:
Just when Democrats think they might have a Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton spoils the party. With her solid victory in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, the former first lady kept her campaign alive and underscored doubts about Barack Obama's November appeal.

First in bellwether Ohio, and now in another crucial swing state, the New York Senator has shown her tenacity. She and her husband are nothing if not relentless, and Mr. Obama can be forgiven if he wakes up at night thinking he's in one of those "Terminator" movies where the machine in the form of a human being just keeps coming. Nothing – not Bill Clinton's gaffes, not the Bosnian sniper-fire fantasy, not even being outspent 3-to-1 – has been able to stop her.
A summary of the demographics:
According to the exit polls, Mrs. Clinton walloped him among voters without a college degree, and by nearly 2-to-1 among high school grads. She won easily among middle-income voters, as well as across the central, northeast and southeast areas of the Keystone State that are home to culturally conservative union households. These voters may not have bought her shot-and-a-beer routine, but they clearly preferred her to Mr. Obama's "bitter" condescension. Perhaps ominously for Mr. Obama's November prospects, Mrs. Clinton crushed him among Catholics, who are the ultimate swing voters across the U.S.
Bottom line: "Mr. Obama still needs to show he can appeal to the non-liberal, non-wealthy American middle class."

The bitter NYT editorial is called "The Low Road to Victory." It's the way she won. She went negative.
The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it....

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.
Inconclusive? But it was a smashing victory! I guess it's "inconclusive" because the party's candidate is yet to be determined. And I fail to see the terrible negativity that ad, which was just a vivid reminder of the weightiness of the President's job and a tweak at Obama for his complaints about questions that are less fun than eating a waffle. A really negative ad would push some ugly factoid in our face — such as Obama's connection to Jeremiah Wright or William Ayers.

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