Two columnists at the New York Times appear to be dueling over their respective candidates. Bill Kristol sees a bright future for Obama.
On Tuesday Obama is expected to prevail in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. So around 9 p.m. Tuesday night, television networks probably will be announcing, for the first time, that Barack Obama holds an unambiguous delegate lead.
His lead in votes — which is already in the neighborhood of 200,000 — will probably have widened. And Obama should be able to increase those delegate and popular vote totals on Feb. 19, when Wisconsin and Hawaii go to the polls.
Next comes March 4, when Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island vote. Clinton’s campaign believes Ohio and Texas will constitute her firewall. Will it hold?
I suspect not. Obama will have momentum. He will likely have more money than Clinton for advertising. His ballot performance among Hispanics and working-class whites has generally been improving as the primary season has gone on. He intends to push a more robust economic message that could help him further narrow the gap among lower-income voters. And an interesting regression analysis at the Daily Kos Web site (poblano.dailykos.com) of the determinants of the Democratic vote so far, applied to the demographics of the Ohio electorate, suggests that Obama has a better chance than is generally realized in Ohio.
As for Texas, look for a couple of possible endorsements to help Obama there. If John Edwards campaigns for Obama in East Texas, and Bill Richardson defies the pleas of Bill Clinton and travels across the border from New Mexico to help out, Obama could prevail.
If Obama wins Ohio and Texas — or even wins one — he’ll be in good shape. He should take Wyoming on March 8 and Mississippi on March 11. Then there’s over a month until the next contest, in Pennsylvania on April 22. That stretch of time could be key. It could be the moment for many of the uncommitted superdelegates to begin ratifying the choice of Democratic primary voters, and to start moving en masse to Obama.
One can but hope. Meanwhile, Paul Krugman is in a foul mood. He sees Obama's supporters as largely "venomous" and Obama himself as a another Bush. Huh? Yes, he does. Krugman should probably have held his tongue and stuck with the economy. Krugman declared for Hillary and is fighting (playing dirty) to maintain his position against a tidal wave of Obama enthusiasm. If we don't support Hillary -- gosh, if we dislike Hillary -- we must be venomous.
Why, then, is there so much venom out there?
I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again.
There's plenty more of that. Krugman is usually a good fellow, very deft with the scalpel when dealing with the outflow of the Bush presidency. Here, it seems, he's got a bean up his nose. Having defended Hillary, he can't bear to see stats and voters falling in line behind another candidate. What Krugman hasn't caught onto is the degree to which many Americans see Hillary's candidacy as an extension of cold, moribund Democratic party politicking.
It would be unkind to quote him further. As the headline on his column reads: "Hate springs eternal."
