Hi all,

I posted this piece over at HuffPo today and I'm already getting a reaction from Obama supporters that I expected, but was hoping to avoid.

The point of the article is this:  We did it.  We won.  And damn does that feel good.  But at this point, it's time to be conciliatory.  It's time to celebrate Hillary Clinton for the sake of appeasing her supporters.  It's time to celebrate our party for the sake of winning in November.

For those of you who read what I write, you know that Hillary has taken a consistent beating from me in nearly every post I write.  I can't stand the way she campaigned, among many other things about her.  But it's time for Obama supporters to stand up and be, well, Obama-esque.

The time for vitriol against our own is over.  For the sake of our party, and our party's new leader.  We can't rely on Obama to be the only one to extend his hand and reconcile.  Reconciliation must come from the bottom up.  Follow me to the jump to see the article:

What began as a night that could have delivered a devastating psychological blow to the Obama campaign has ended with an extraordinary win for Barack Obama, leaving him comfortably poised to ascend to the nomination. Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton easily in North Carolina and, in a true squeaker, lost narrowly in Indiana, a result the Clinton campaign will be unable to overcome.

Expectations had cratered for Obama approaching the evening, shifting the likelihood of a large victory in North Carolina to merely the hope for a small one. In Indiana, what began as a potential victory for Obama ended with a Clinton victory assumed. And yet, expectations were shattered; Obama’s North Carolina victory was decisive, his victory speech transcendent, and his loss in Indiana so close, it hardly feels like a loss.

In the aftermath of the Reverend Wright tornado, many of Barack Obama’s most ardent supporters have begun to feel a bit of trepidation, a kind of uncertainty that is deeply unsettling. What was easily the most trying week for the Obama campaign appeared to follow a week that was nearly as bad. With the Clinton campaign on the war path, pressing their message that Obama’s candidacy would be doomed in November, and with a hungry media, happy to oblige in repetition, it has become difficult for some to wade through the spin to the truth. Is November really slipping from Obama’s grasp? Is the nomination?

The answer to both is a resounding no.

Late Sunday evening, the Clinton campaign confirmed that Mark Penn was stepping down as chief strategist in the wake of his dust-up with the Colombian government. That his tenure at the helm of the campaign ended because of a connection to a Burson-Marsteller client is not terribly surprising. But there were plenty of reasons, far better than this one, to have fired Penn many months before.

Penn presided over a top-down campaign in which, to the surprise of most observers, he was responsible for both crafting the message and polling its effectiveness. Normally frowned upon, such an approach often leads to self-fulfilling polling that validates the assumptions of the strategist, rather than providing an objective assessment. Perhaps that is the best explanation for a series of horribly misguided message strategies that Penn employed.

As Florida and Michigan edge closer to delegate reselection compromises, the Clinton campaign should see nothing but bad news ahead. With a pledged delegate deficit that even her campaign views as insurmountable, and a superdelegate lead that appears to be narrowing by the day, the primary rationale for Clinton’s continued candidacy is uncertainty.

It is uncertainty that has prevented Clinton from being forced from the race by her party. It is uncertainty that fuels the main stream media’s coverage – the only justification for describing a race that Obama cannot lose as a virtual tie. Why, the Clinton campaign argues, should Hillary concede defeat in a race filled with so much uncertainty?

But as the race moves into its final stages, and as the Michigan and Florida sideshow is resolved, the race moves ever closer to that one thing the Clinton campaign cannot afford to accept: certainty.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll has some surprising numbers about the Republican Party, some of which have been described by other commentators as paradoxical. President Bush's approval numbers continue to remain in the low 30s, while 49% view the Republican Party unfavorably. A whopping 43% believe they are worse off than they were four years ago, a truly shocking number when one considers how utterly bleak the state of the nation was four years ago. 76% of voters want the next president to pursue an approach other than that of President Bush, and in a generic match-up, the Democratic nominee beats the Republican nominee in a thirteen point landslide.

Yet when John McCain is paired against Hillary Clinton, he only loses by two points, and when pitted against Obama, he only loses by three. If voters are fed up with the Republican Party and George W. Bush, and if they are eager for a Democrat to take over, why is John McCain's margin so close?

Recently there has been increasing discussion, sparked initially by NBC Political Director Chuck Todd, about the Clinton campaign's real motives behind pushing for a revote in Florida and Michigan. The likelihood of only modest pledged delegate gains from the two contests suggests that Clinton is, instead, aiming for the superdelegates.

Combined, Michigan and Florida have 54 superdelegates, all of whom were stripped of their status when their states were stripped of their pledged delegates. Among them, Hillary Clinton is expected to have substantially more supporters than Obama, the product of longtime friendships and her advocacy in favor of seating each delegation.

The Obama campaign should argue forcefully that these superdelegates should not be seated in Denver, regardless of what happens with revotes in the state. To be sure, the people of Florida and Michigan had no say in the decision of their states to move their primaries forward. While the original votes in January clearly cannot be counted, a revote does seem to be a reasonable remedy, and one that seems likely to be pursued.

Hillary’s wins yesterday in Texas and Ohio breathed new life into her campaign.  Basking in the glow of fresh momentum, Hillary did six morning show appearances today, and will continue to try to shape the story as a brand new race.

But Hillary’s spin, and the media adoption of that spin, will do little to change an even starker reality this morning:  Hillary Clinton cannot win the Democratic nomination.  Barack Obama’s pledged delegate lead was substantial before Texas and Ohio and will remain materially unchanged in its aftermath.  He has cut Clinton’s super delegate lead in half since February 5th, and is expected to roll-out as many as fifty more throughout the next few weeks.  

From Loewe Political Report,

There has bit a lot of discussion over the last few days about John McCain's attacks on Barack Obama for refusing to agree to a publicly financed general election.

The one thing these stories haven't covered, is how badly McCain screwed this one up.

From Loewe Political Report,

From The Loewe Political Report,

After receiving a lot of good feedback on my lengthy analysis of Why Obama is Closer to the Nomination Than You'd Think from this and other sites, I thought I'd post another analysis.  This time, I focus on the most significant ways in which the Clinton campaign miscalculated heading into this campaign.

I'll post the full analysis below, but in a nutshell:

She won the losing side of a debate she framed herself.

and

Mark Penn applied his microtrend philosophy to a macrotrend election.

To read more, visit Loewe Political Report.

For more blog posts from Dylan Loewe, visit Loewe Political Report:

If Barack Obama is nominated by the Democratic Party – every day that appears more and more likely – he will have an interesting dilemma in selecting a running mate. On the one hand, he will want to anchor the ticket with someone who can compliment his perceived weaknesses – age, experience, accomplishments. At the same time, having spent more than a year running on the banner of a new-kind-of-politics, Obama would be poorly served selecting a running mate who was borne out of the politics of old. The quandary Obama may find himself in is no easy feat to overcome; it seems almost entirely implausible that someone could anchor Obama with national experience without weighting him down with Washington experience.

I know I'm probably going to take a lot of heat for this opinion, but in my latest post on Loewe Political Report, I argue that Jim Webb is, by far, Obama's best choice for a Vice Presidential nominee, despite his indefensible telecom immunity vote.

Here's an excerpt:

I wanted to start this diary by thanking everyone in the Daily Kos community for recommending my diary yesterday and visiting my new blog, Loewe Political Report.  On our second day in business, we had 3,551 page views.  Not too shabby.  So thank you thank you thank you.

Given the great response I got yesterday for my post, "Why Obama is Closer to the Nomination Than You'd Think," I figured I'd give it a shot once more, and post a diary with my more recent post, "What Obama has to do to Lose the Nomination."

UPDATE:  Thanks for recommending my post!  I just posted today's entry:  Check it out at www.dylanloewe.com

Yesterday marked the first day of my blog:  Loewe Political Report.

It was a great first day to be sure.

We've already been featured on Ben Smithat the Politico and by Noam Scheiber at The New Republic.

The goal of the blog is to give comprehensive insight into the 2008 race, with commentary on where the race stands and where we can expect it to go.  About me:  I used to be the Executive Director of Ballotground, a multi-state ballot initiative campaign that's aim was to place anti-war ballot initiatives on 2008 battleground state ballots.  The hope was that we could drive Democratic turnout.  Unfortunately, the money dried up by January, and I'm now back in graduate school, where I'm getting a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School and a law degree from Columbia Law School.

A lot of pundits today, in their scramble to hypothesize, have suggested that Hillary Clinton's victory in the New Hampshire primary may have been, at least in part, the result of the Bradley effect.

The problem with the analogy is that it misunderstands what the Bradley effect was.  When Tom Bradley was running in a GENERAL election in California, pollsters were calling Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters to ask them about their preference for governor.  There were scores of Democratic voters who didn't want to vote for a black man but were afraid of being judged for uncharacteristically supporting a Republican.  They had incentive to lie.  And they did.  Bradley, who had been expected to win by 7 points, lost by 1 point.

Last week, both on his show Real Time with Bill Maher, and in a blog post on Huffington Post, Bill Maher discussed the need for a twist on Rovian strategy, a progressive ballot initiative campaign aimed at increasing turnout from within the Democratic base.  In both settings, Maher expressed frustration that such a ballot initiative campaign didn't exist.  

We are happy to report that there is such a campaign:  The Ballotground Initiative.