Primary thoughts.

[phamos]

I haven't poked around on too many sites yet, but it looks like the meida isn't particularly into Clinton's "turned a corner" spin, thank goodness. Clinton was always ahead in Ohio -- I think only one poll in the last two weeks showed Obama ahead, and that was Zogby, who has had a terrible track record this election. SurveyUSA, which has been much more accurate, gave Clinton a 17 point spread before the Wisconsin election, a 9 point spread right after Wisconsin, and a 6 point spread last week. On Sunday, they got it exactly right -- 54-44. So instead of framing this as losing 7 points in the last two weeks, they say they won 4 points in the last week. It's all spin. In two weeks, this race went from "Hillary HAS to win BOTH Ohio and Texas to even stay in the race" to "Hillary won Texas and Ohio over giant odds and is now the front-runner" -- huh?

Texas is definitely more depressing, because it looks like the people who decided in the last couple of days went heavy for Clinton. That's validation for Clinton's camp for it's strategy of going negative. Unfortunately, the campaign is now going to get ugly, because Obama's going to have to go ugly back. I really, really didn't want this to happen, and it's disappointing to me. One of my favorite aspects of Obama's campaign has been his reluctance to play dirty politics, so depending on how gross things get in the next few weeks, it might seriously temper my enthusiasm for him.


OK, end of partisan grumpiness. Congrats to the Hillary supporters on my list, and let's hope everything stays civil until Pennsylvania. (Seven weeks? Jebus.)

Comments

[talamasca.livejournal.com]

The problem with comparing Rezko with Whitewater and other Clinton scandals is that the latter are old news. No, I'm not saying that they don't matter, just this. First of all, the Clinton scandals have been investigated several times now, and nothing new has come up about them in a while. Second--with the exception of people who lived under a rock in the 90's--everybody knows about these scandals already. If Obama brought them up, they wouldn't surprise anybody, 'cause a knee-jerk reaction against Clinton. People presumably have already thought about them, formed their opinions on their veracity and seriousness, and so have already decided whether or not the scandals affect their view of Hillary and their vote.

Rezko, on the other hand, is just coming to trial. There's potential for new information to come of this. This could either vindicate or implicate Obama, the problem being if it's the latter. (Or, it could do neither, and continue questions as to Obama's involvement, which is also a problem.) The trial will also keep this in the news, whereas presumably Whitewater isn't going to show up except as a retrospective or if Obama specifically calls her out on it. And Rezko is also new enough that many people will not have heard of it yet, and others will not have decided what they think of it. So there's potential for someone to hear about it and have an "oh shit, Obama has a scandal" reaction.

It occurred to me a little bit ago that Hillary may have actually done Obama a favor (unwittingly, of course) by bringing Rezko up in the primary. I mean, Obama's ties with Rezko aren't something made up by the Clinton campaign, or something only they would have been able to discover. It would have come out eventually. Bringing it up in the primary means that McCain won't be able to spring it on Obama, say, 2 weeks before the election date, perhaps causing uncertainty in Obama's ranks. Instead, people may have time to take it in and decide, perhaps, that there's really nothing to it (if indeed there isn't). They may have time to form informed opinions, instead of just simply reacting to cries of "scandal!"