For Clinton, A Following Of 'Marshans'

Michelle Marshall, a.k.a. Taylor Marsh, in 2002. "Nobody's more in touch with Clinton supporters, except maybe the Clinton campaign," she says. (Www.taylormarsh.com)

"It was like, 'Oh my God, they are going to do this to her,' " Marshall recalled, deciding that she could help by advocating for Clinton online.

As her popularity grew, her blogs were posted on the Huffington Post, Firedoglake and other liberal outlets. Now she's almost able to break even some months, with a few Web ads and donations from Clinton supporters who read her site. Marshall is also trying to parlay her popularity into an on-air radio program -- she does a live webcast every day.

Before launching the blog, she acted and sang in theater in New York, wrote personal ads for the LA Weekly and for a year helped run an adult entertainment Web site. Marshall later wrote a book about that year called "My Year in Smut."

She's 47, and said she still has the practicality of a childhood in Missouri and the thirst for fame from years in New York and Los Angeles. She moved to Las Vegas a little more than five years ago hoping she would succeed on the radio in a smaller market, but it didn't pan out.

During the course of the presidential primary, Marshall has harshly and frequently bashed Obama, recently taunting that "her map beats his math." In a March blog entry, she sarcastically called Obama "Mr. Hope" and said the fraud trial of his Chicago supporter Antoin "Tony" Rezko would stick on Obama's shoe and "the stench will follow him into the general election if he's the nominee."

She took a swipe at him again this week by mocking his recent departure from Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago with the posting of another controversial YouTube video of a preacher at the church, and writing: "Just think if Senator Obama hadn't fled the comfy confines of his church a little over 24 hours ago. Then he'd really have some explaining to do."

But her jabs are nothing compared to the broadsides delivered by her readers. One, whose screen name is "Die for Hillary," wrote at 3:06 a.m. one day last week: "Guys for me its now a war, they cannot take it away from us, we the people need to stand up and show them!!!! SUGGEST SOMETHING LETS PLAN!"

A few minutes later, Heidi Li Feldman, a Georgetown law and philosophy professor who raises money for Clinton and regularly reads Marsh's blog, responded under the screen name HLF: "Whether, for the general election, the Dems end up running the person who can win (that would be Senator Clinton) or the person far less likely to win (that would be Senator Obama) is just not possible to predict right now. I feel I have to keep saying the following. The superdelegates can pledge and endorse all they want but they can reverse and retract all they want. They have done it before and they can do it again."

A reader who calls herself Patsy, and writes a blog titled Soldier 4 Hillary, later posted a link to a YouTube video she made of herself arguing that Democrats should nominate Clinton. It was titled "WARNING! WE NEED A PRESIDENT! NOT A BFF!"

Marshall is aware that her readers are voicing misgivings that many Democrats have about Obama -- the fear that he's an "October surprise" waiting to happen, that he will be seen as a lightweight (Best Friend Forever) against McCain's experienced war hero, that Hispanics and working-class whites won't vote for him no matter what he says.

On the night that Clinton won Kentucky and Obama won Oregon, Marshall leaned back on her living room sofa and pressed mute as Obama declared that he had moved a step closer to winning the Democratic nomination. Marshall frowned, took a sip of white wine and let loose.

"If Obama is our nominee, I think he is going to lose Missouri. I think he is going to lose Florida. I think he is going to lose Kentucky," she said. "Will Obama get the Latino vote in a general election against John McCain? Good luck. And how about women? You'll never convince me that Hillary Clinton is not the better candidate."