Wednesday, May 07, 2008

John Hood on North Carolina Primary on National Review Online

Obama wins big in NC.  Clinton squeaks by in Indiana.  Pretty much what most people expected.  The Clintonistas were hoping for a miracle in NC, but it didn't happen. Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos can take some credit for pushing her over the top in Indiana, but it's hardly enough to sway any superdelegates.  However, she seems unlikely to quit.  It's now time to bargain to see what the party and Obama will give her to get her to bow out.  She can't win, but she can still hurt him so they'll give her a good deal.

I tend to agree with John Hood's predictions:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzljZmQyNDQyZjNmMjE2NGE4YTY5ODdjYjkxZWEwMzk=

Here's what I think happens next. The Clintons won't be willing to go out on Tuesday's poor showing. They'll wait to win the West Virginia and Kentucky contests, at least. But the uncommitted super-delegates are going to stop trickling and start streaming into the Obama fold. The national media will (rightly this time) declare her chances remote of accumulating enough popular votes to convince the delegates to pick her instead. Some of the disappointed Clinton base will, indeed, prove to be persuadable by John McCain in the fall, but Republican partisans are dreaming if they think that permanent, irreparable damage has been done to the Democratic electoral coalition. The American public has heard troubling things about Barack Obama. But it heard them in the spring, not in the fall. All the basic rules of political science tell us that McCain has a steep uphill climb ahead of him. These rules haven't been eradicated by a few impolitic words and a couple of weeks of bad press.

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