The Newspaper and the Senator

Not in so many words, but that's the underlying message. It may be cloaked in demographic analyses about how Barack Obama cut into her base, or mathematical calculations about the delegate count, but the take-away is that her chances are "between slim and none," as CNN's Jack Cafferty put it yesterday.

I don't know any journalist who privately believes that Clinton is going to win the nomination. Of course, the media experts have been spectacularly wrong several times over in this campaign. But coming back from an 0-for-10 losing streak isn't easy.

Obama even blew Hillary off the television screen on Tuesday night, as I report here.

It's got to be discouraging for the Clintonites. In the days before Wisconsin, the coverage was all about controversies they generated--whether Obama had plagiarized Deval Patrick, whether he had broken his promise to accept public financing in the fall--and one they didn't, the Michelle Obama comments on lack of pride in America. And Hillary still got creamed.

Tonight is the first of two debates before Ohio and Texas. How does the New York senator change the conversation? Does she simply offer a souped-up version of "speeches" versus "solutions," which doesn't seem to be getting her much traction? Does she say the Republicans will crack Obama open "like a soft peanut," as Bob Kerrey warned about her husband in 1992? Does she start throwing around names like Rezko? Or does she worry about being perceived as too negative?

The headlines on the liberal blogs tell the story. The New Republic goes with "The Collapse of Hillary." Writes Michael Crowley:

"It's been a few weeks since that inevitability collapsed--the South Carolina blowout was probably the tipping point. But it was only last night that Hillary finally acquired the odor of a loser . . .

"The Clintons have played most every card imaginable, some more explicitly than others: inexperience, age, electability, race, drugs, Rezko, Exelon, and now plagiarism . . .

"Meanwhile, with every win, Obama makes more sense. He is no longer a leap of faith but a real winner. And what once seemed a major threat to his chances--uncertainty about the role of his race--has faded away. It was Obama's great luck to preface the March 4 votes in Ohio and Texas by winning without enough black voters to make for a storyline about a racial divide. Conversely, Hillary has been completely stripped of what was once her greatest asset: inevitability. Many of her early supporters believed the Clinton machine was virtually invulnerable. Mark Penn had mapped the electoral matrix. Her press team operated with the flawless efficiency of a Secret Service detail. Bill had telepathic powers over fellow Democrats. But none of it has worked so far. And if none of it has worked until now, why should it work on March 4--which even Hillary's defenders call her last stand?"

For American Prospect, it's "The Underperfomer." Ezra Klein says the latest results "have less to say about Obama than they do about Clinton, and in particular, the collapse of her campaign. Her aura of inevitability has given way to a fight for relevance. She is no longer the default candidate--her losses are not confined to demographically unfriendly electorates or surprise upsets. They have become the norm for her campaign and are damaging the foundations of her candidacy . . .

"Politically, the Clinton campaign has been, if anything, worse. The campaign repeatedly squandered advantages by overreaching on the attack and presenting surrogates it proved unable to control. Bill Clinton's frequent outbursts did not bespeak a disciplined campaign operation. Nor did Mark Penn's increasingly desperate spin, as when he suggested, in what Markos Zunigas called the 'insult-40-states-strategy,' that the true test of a campaign was its ability to win primaries in massive, heavily Democratic states like New York and California. The constant reports of campaign infighting didn't help, nor did the ceaseless leaks."

Hill has even lost Susan Sarandon, the Nation reports: