Hillary Sinks in Potomac

Before we get to the demographic, geopolitical and psychological breakdowns of Barack Obama's triple victory yesterday, I just want to make one observation.

Hillary Clinton lived in Washington for eight years, in a very large home with a big back yard and a great view. She was a local figure as first lady. She made plenty of appearances in the District, the Maryland suburbs and Northern Virginia, while Obama hadn't even gotten himself elected to the Illinois legislature. She should have had the home-field advantage.

Instead, she got walloped. The easy explanation is that there are a lot of African Americans in the District and Maryland. But Virginia? A big NASCAR state that has tended to elect moderate Democrats such as Chuck Robb, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine? Clinton should have been at least competitive, and she got creamed.

The suspense lasted until one second after 7 o'clock, when all the cable networks simultaneously projected Obama the winner in Virginia, which was supposed to be Hillary's best shot. And exit polls showing that Obama carried white men in the commonwealth underscored the depth of Clinton's dilemma. (Obama would have clinched Maryland at 8 p.m. had the sleet not prompted a judge to extend voting for another 90 minutes.)

Hillary was making the argument this week that she's winning the blue states, from Massachusetts to California, that Dems have to win in the fall, while Obama is piling up victories in such red states as Idaho, North Dakota and Nebraska, which the party doesn't have a prayer of taking in November. But what about Maryland, which hasn't voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988? Doesn't that suggest a fundamental weakness in her candidacy? And what about Wisconsin next week, which the Clinton camp is all but conceding to Obama, at least in the spin wars? A poll there has it Obama 50, Hillary 39.

I don't want to fall into the trap of assuming that Obama is winning because he's strung a few victories together. This is a long, tough slog. But February hasn't been a good month for Clinton, including right here where she used to live. (Plus, her deputy campaign manager is out.)

One other thought: Does Hillary ever acknowledge setbacks? As she pumped up a crowd in El Paso, demanding a higher minimum wage, ignoring her Potomac wipeout, she just seemed in denial. Wouldn't it have been better to take note of her tough day and vow to fight on? I'm just sayin'.

As for John McCain, Mike Huckabee gave him a run for his money in Virginia before the networks called it for Mac, prompting plenty of TV chatter about his apparent weakness as an all-but-official nominee. Chris Matthews says Republicans are using Huckabee's continued presence on the ballot as a chance to express "buyer's remorse," and he has a point. The record, of course, will show that McCain won all three.

Obama made a nice pivot in his victory speech, mixing personal praise and political criticism of McCain. He chided those who dismiss him as a "hopemonger," saying he knows how hard it is to achieve change. And as if to combat complaints that he dabbles in empty rhetoric, his campaign scheduled a major economic speech for today.

He also stepped on the beginning of the speech by McCain, who, frankly, should have tried to go first. Cable coverage of these events is invaluable, and he needs to milk it. McCain speaks with a quiet dignity, but he's no oratorical match for Obama--even as he lifted Barack's "Fired up, ready to go" slogan--and was thus overshadowed.

LAT: "Obama stacked his wins on top of a string of victories over the weekend, pushing his record to 8-0 since he and Clinton effectively fought to a draw a week earlier on Super Tuesday. Obama's performance puts a breeze at his back and increases pressure on the suddenly struggling Clinton to reverse her fortunes in the next two weeks, when voters in another half-dozen states go to the polls."

NYT: "The lopsided nature of Senator Barack Obama's parade of victories on Tuesday gives him an opening to make the case that Democratic voters have broken in his favor and that the party should coalesce around his candidacy."

Boston Globe: "Day after day, Clinton has endured the kind of defeats that President Bush calls 'thumpings.' . . . The percussive effect of eight losses in a row, with two more potential blows next week in Wisconsin and Hawaii, could take a toll on the morale of the Clinton campaign team and her voters."

Chicago Tribune: "Obama and McCain came away with victories, but it was the strength and breadth of Obama's that was most notable. He won majorities of women, won sizable numbers of blue-collar votes and captured nearly half the votes of all whites. As he has in earlier contests, Obama also held formidable margins among affluent, educated voters.

"McCain's unimpressive win over Huckabee in Virginia laid bare that the Arizona senator has yet to convince religious conservatives in his party, a group that he would need in order to prevail in November."

Baltimore Sun: "Barack Obama might keep calling himself the underdog. But from now on, that dog won't hunt. His smashing victories in three Mid-Atlantic primaries Tuesday will likely be seen as a turning point in the 2008 presidential contest."

At Slate, John Dickerson says Obama still faces certain pitfalls:

"Who would want to be the front-runner in this race? Every time someone is thus anointed, he or she falters. This isn't just superstition. There are specific pressures that come with being at the front of the field. Buyer's remorse can set in. As more Democrats look at Obama in nominee focus, they might start to worry over his general election liabilities. He may have experience, but he's never really been tested. (These unresolved qualms may explain why voters who make up their mind on Election Day go with Clinton).

"The press might start pushing harder on Obama, too. The stories that weren't followed up on during the galloping horse race stage of the early primaries might get a second look. Plus, there are more reporters covering fewer candidates, and perhaps the press will feel compelled to extensively vet a candidate who looks like he's on his way to the nomination."

The press might, true. So far it hasn't.

Was Patty Solis Doyle the wrong fall-person? The Nation's Ari Berman suggests:

"If Clinton was serious about fundamentally reorienting the campaign, she would have shown her chief strategist, Mark Penn, the door months ago. After all, it was Penn who packaged Clinton as a corporate-friendly, poll-driven technocrat, long on experience and short on inspiration."

Why does Hill keep losing? National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez thinks she has a clue:

"Hillary Clinton has a man problem. And this time, it's bigger than just Bill. Take a look at the exit polls coming out of the primaries thus far: Men are going for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. In California, men went for Obama, 51 percent to Clinton's 39 percent, according to the San Jose Mercury News. In South Carolina, 55 percent of men voted for Obama, with only 23 percent going for Clinton. (Edwards took the bulk of the rest.)

"This is not about sexism. But try telling that to feminists Gloria Steinem and Erica Jong, who both recently wrote whiny op-eds about the urgency of voting for girl power now. I suspect the folks going for Obama are casting their votes for the undefined, middle-of-the-spectrum candidate. Although, according to National Journal, he is the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate, he doesn't come off that way on the campaign trail: Obama sounds and looks conservative enough that even conservative pundits have had good things to say about him -- a fact that promises to be a detriment to those conservatives if he becomes the Democratic nominee."

NYT blogger Stanley Fish got hundreds of comments after a column on Hillary hatred, thereby proving his point:

"These Clintonphobes said things like 'there's nothing to like about her'(394) and wrote at length about her clothing, her voice, her laugh, her arrogance, her 'countless plastic surgeries' (an inference it would seem from the fact that at 60 she still looks good), her insincerity, her stridency, her ambition, her love of power, and her husband. In their view, the hatred they expressed was not irrational at all, but was provoked by record of crimes and character flaws they are happy to rehearse."

Remember when GQ spiked a story about infighting in the Hillary campaign so it could get access to Bill Clinton for a puff piece on his Africa endeavors? The Atlantic's Josh Green resurrects part of that ill-fated GQ article, and says Patti Solis Doyle was part of an arrogant attitude at Camp Clinton:

"Such arrogance led directly to the idea that Clinton could simply project an air of inevitability and be assured her party's nomination. If she wins--as she very well might--it will be in spite of her original approach. As one former Clinton staffer put it to me last spring: "There was an assumption that if you were a major donor and wanted to be an ambassador, go to state dinners with the queen--unless you were an outright fool, you were going to go with Hillary, whether you liked her or not. The attitude was 'Where else are they going to go?'

"Concerns about Solis Doyle have preoccupied many in the campaign for several years. Clinton insiders say that her campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, launched an unsuccessful bid to remove Solis Doyle while on vacation with the Clintons two years ago. Two top campaign officials told me that Maggie Williams, Hillary's former chief of staff (and, as of Sunday, her campaign manager), also sought and failed to have Solis Doyle removed two years ago. Last year, some of Bill Clinton's former advisers, known as the 'White Boys,' lobbied to oust her, too."

In PimpedOut-gate, Guy Branum makes the case that Chelsea Clinton should be fair game for the media. But then he recalls his own attack on the First Daughter when they were Berkeley students in 1997:

"Sure, my line 'show your spirit on Chelsea's bloodied carcass' was over the top and poorly chosen. And then the AP wire snipped my column's line, 'Chelsea Clinton represents the Stanford ethos of establishment worship which must be subverted and destroyed,' into 'Chelsea Clinton . . . must be destroyed.' "

Over the top--the understatement of the year.

The Page's Mark Halperin ticks off some of Obama's virtues:

"A candidate with the skill to both write and deliver moving, eloquent, historic-feeling and momentum-inducing speeches at pivotal moments (victory speeches, major rallies, crucial battlegrounds).

"A tight-knit staff that never fights with each other publicly and rarely in private -- who respect and like each other . . .

"A candidate with an uncanny natural sense -- rare in someone so new to national politics -- of timing, pacing, rhythm, and tone . . .

"A candidate who generally has fun on the campaign trail -- and shows it (even when he is tired)."

Conservative pundits are now starting to train their fire on Obama. The Weekly Standard's Dean Barnett tees one up:

"In spite of Obama's obvious strengths in this area, questions linger regarding Obama's gifted speechifying. Do his speeches give us a glimpse at a very special man with a unique vision? Or are we merely witnessing a political one-trick pony? Yes, Obama can turn a phrase better and do more with a Teleprompter than any other modern era politician. But does his special skill set here actually mean anything, or is it instead the political equivalent of a dog walking on its hind legs--unusual and riveting, but not especially significant? Regardless, the liberal commentators have gushed their praise nearly every time Obama has opened his mouth before a Teleprompter the past few months."

Barnett says Obama isn't that great without the prompter, but I've seen him work crowds without so much as an index card and I couldn't disagree more.

The buzz in political circles is why Obama has been winning in states with few blacks and states with a large African American population, but not in more racially diverse states (where there might be more tension between the races). Jonah Goldberg has an interesting theory:

"The hard interpretation would be that diversity does in fact breed racism and ethnic resentment. But a softer, and I think slightly more plausible, reading would be that increased diversity breeds not so much resentment as realism -- at least among the rank-and-file voters. It's easy for upscale liberals to talk about the glories of diversity because they live at Olympian heights, above the reality of multicultural America. For Obama's wealthy, white, liberal supporters, diversity is knowing a rich black lawyer, a wealthy Latino accountant and lots of well-to-do gay folks.

"Meanwhile, for working-class white liberals who live in places such as Iowa or Maine, it's easy to see our racial divide in almost purely theoretical terms and therefore believe that purely rhetorical responses are sufficient; Obama says the right words, and that's all we need. But for much of the rest of the country, people are more skeptical that high-flying talk about diversity and unity, married to fairly conventional liberal policies on affirmative action, immigration and the like, will do much to solve the real problems we face. They may have never heard such rhetoric delivered so well. But they've certainly heard it before."

Maybe Obama's victories yesterday will put the racial analysis to rest.

As the right eyes Obama, the left is starting to unload on McCain. Arianna Huffington tells journalists to wake up and smell the ideology:

"Please, stop pretending that McCain is still the dashing rebel that made knees buckle back in the day -- and stop referring to him, as the New York Times did this weekend, as 'moderate' and a 'centrist.'

"What is it going to take for you guys to face reality? McCain verbally stroking Rove should be the equivalent of that great scene at the end of The Godfather where Diane Keaton's Kay watches in horror as Al Pacino transforms, in the kiss of a ring, from her loving husband Michael into the next Don Corleone. This ain't the same man you married.

"I know it's hard. I myself was deeply enamored of the old McCain. In 2000, I invited him to give the keynote address at the Shadow Convention I'd helped organize."

But that was then.

This is just delicious: Sam Zell, the mogul who recently bought the Tribune Co., has been walking around dropping the F-bomb, prompting this memo from top L.A. Times editors, according to LAObserved:

"It's not good judgment to use profane or hostile language and we can't tolerate that . . . Sam is a force of nature; the rest of us are bound by the normal conventions of society."

In other words, he owns the joint; don't even $#!!@ think about it.

But along comes this letter from LAT pressman Ed Padgett, who dared curse and "I was told if I used the F-word again, I would be sent home without pay."

He blogged about it, and "Sam Zell read the post and sent me a picture of him pulling on his right ear lobe, again, published on my blog Monday. The pressroom personal are on the floor laughing their [expletive] off, while our managers are somewhat [expletive]."

I've got to delete the expletives until this Web site adopts Zell rules.