Ugly Coverage

Obama as pet rock? Hula hoop? Overpriced iPhone? The man has gotten millions of votes.

Hillary also gets some huzzahs from the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes:

"Hillary Clinton has emerged as a disciplined and far more effective candidate when her campaign is on the verge of collapse. She becomes more focused and energized, tougher, meaner, and, oddly enough, more appealing. And of course she then survives.

"At times, she appears downright schizophrenic. On the one hand, she tears up, she plays the victim of unfair accusations, and she moans about how harshly politics treats her. On the other, she storms ahead aggressively, runs sharply negative TV ads, and blisters Barack Obama with charges. The Los Angeles Times put this headline on a front-page story that explained her victories in Ohio and Texas: 'Going negative proved positive in comeback.'

"Though not in so many words, Clinton sends this message to America: I'm going to be in your face, imposing myself on you, making demands, and never letting up, until you elect me president. I'll never go away until you do. The single adjective that best describes her is relentless. In presidential politics, this is a very helpful trait."

At American Prospect, Ezra Klein says Hillary faces the prospect of a kamikaze mission:

"Clinton's problem now is that she doesn't need to beat Obama, she has to convince the superdelegates to beat Obama for her. And this requires a different sort of argument. Even under assumptions very favorable to Clinton, Obama is likely to end the primaries with 100 or so more pledged delegates than she has. Her only hope is that the party elders, the so-called superdelegates, will grow so uncomfortable with Obama's weaknesses that they'll intervene on her behalf, risking the ire of their constituents, the fury of African-American voters who feel betrayed by their party, and a convention storyline that blames a smoke-filled backroom for overturning the will of the voters. That's a tall order.

"To convince them to do so, she'll need to fatally wound Obama. But attacking that ferociously will destroy her candidacy, too, and infuriate superdelegates who see her irreversibly bloodying the Democrats' likely nominee and thus hurting the party's chances for victory. What she really needs is for Obama to independently collapse, so the superdelegates have a reason to turn on him. But that's exceedingly unlikely."

But what if the "will of the voters" amounts to, say, 50 delegates out of 2,000?

Of course, we can always blame the news media, as Open Left poster Mike Lux does:

"Congratulations to the traditional media. You've given Barack a pretty good ride overall, but when you realized this cash cow, ratings-spiking, newspaper-selling race might end, you turned on him with a vengeance. You had a good night last night, as our race keeps going, and you got to announce your hero McCain as the official GOP nominee all on the same night."

With a "vengeance"? I've seen vengeance, buddy, and this ain't it.

Maybe what we need is--more debates! The prospect makes Tom Bevan groan at Real Clear Politics:

"Here's an unbearably haughty 881 words from the schoolmarms at the New York Times editorial page complaining about the 'tone' of the campaign and suggesting what we really need is more debate of the issues.

"But we've had 20 debates. The most in history. In fact, we've had so much debate that any reasonably well informed person can recite verbatim the candidates' positions on issues from trade to taxes to Iraq. Giving the candidates more opportunities to offer their canned responses to issues hardly makes things better -- especially when there is little no to difference between the two in any area of policy. How many more times do we have to watch Clinton and Obama argue over the niggling nuances of their healthcare proposals, for example? The mere thought makes me want to self-medicate heavily.

"Say what you want about Hillary Clinton's 'kitchen sink' strategy - and set aside whether you think a protracted fight between Clinton and Obama is damaging to the party and/or helpful to John McCain (both unknowable, by the way, despite the instant CW) - at least with the '3 am' ad Clinton finally succeeded in drawing some sort of contrast with Obama in the final days leading up to March 4th, and she put him under the kind of intense scrutiny he's sure to get from the Republicans if he's the nominee.

"If there's an indictment to be made here, it's not over a 'lack of debate.' Place the blame where it belongs: on a process that is way too long, too drawn out, and yet is still expected to feed the media beast day in and day out for the better part of two years. This is what you get."

Barack, meanwhile, is a fundraising machine:

"The campaign of Sen. Barack Obama announced that it had raised $55 million in February, $20 million more than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and an apparent record for a single month," the LAT reports.

At Americablog, John Aravosis jumps on Obama's latest criticism:

"So is that why Hillary isn't releasing her returns? Because she knows that sometimes tax returns hide things that might appear (or be) scandalous? But even that argument doesn't make sense since Hillary has promised to release her returns AFTER she becomes the nominee. That means that she has no privacy interest in her tax returns, she's going to let the public see them soon anyway, but she simply doesn't want Democratic voters to get the chance to have her tax returns inform their vote during the primaries.

"See, here's how it works. Hillary's tax returns could have something foul-smelling in them, like her 10,000% profit on the cattle-futures. If she releases her returns now, it gives you and me and every other Democratic voter the chance to judge her on what's in her returns, and vote accordingly. But if she waits until after she becomes the nominee, she knows she has us by the, uh, cattle-futures. As a Democrat, I might not vote for Hillary in the primary if I see something fishy in her tax returns. But in the general election, of course I'm going to vote for Hillary, regardless of what's in her returns."

And speaking of that sort of thing, the Washington Times raises questions about how Bill Clinton made $700,000 by selling nonpublic stock he was given for a single speech.