Thank you - excellent report...

MY GOD YOU GUYS ARE SUCH BROWN NOSERS. HOW MUCH IS HILLARY PAYING YOU.

there i said it for all the Obama supporters so they dont have to. UGH

anyway

Bill is a great speaker, i always think about his Harvard shindig last year, it was phenomenal. just awesome

The Clintons are so yesterday.

That one's going to be close.

The only offsets are the Richmond vote AND the upstate high tech vote. Hillary has the exurban and the rural vote locked down....

This was hillary's  to lose. The campaign did not prepare or was flexible to adjust to Obama's campaign.

They did not have a 50 state strategy so they did not reserve resources for caucus states.  They have less rallies,  less ads. They did not have an internet strategy.  They did not harness volunteerism,  and internet fundraising and making people part of their campaign or own it so they will feel responsible to work for it for free.

They have this ads on cable now--but the audio softens when her ad comes out (which is the opposite of the usual ad when it loudens). They dont have radio ads in the WTOP--news radio but Obama has several.  

Hillary grows on you.  Even if someone heard all the bad things about Hillary and has visceral dislike with her--but when they hear her talk and see her talk--they ask themselves--why dont I like her again.  My sister was a GOP previously but she wants to vote for Hillary.  Few years ago she was repeating the things Rush said about Hillary.

Hillary should have fought harder here in the Cheseapeake region and even Maryland.  They should have hold rallies in the Eastern Shore or Western Maryland. And they should not have the relinquish the caucus states.

They should also embraced being the first woman president and ask women to vote for the first woman president in the US.  Other countries have women leaders not us.  Especially women makes a majority of Dem electorate.  She should have harness them to a frenzy to activate them to vote.

Does this prognosticator from NotLarrySabato have numbers, or just vague talk?

I love this diary, however I don't like reference to this being "the last throes of a presidential campaign."   This is far from over!!  This is not the last throes of anything!  

I hope she breaks even tomorrow in order to at least keep momentum.  But even if she doesn't, I still have hope for Wisconsin!!

Tomorrow's NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/us/pol itics/12clinton.html?_r=3&hp=&or ef=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref= slogin

She's not even going to come close. A poll taken showed Obama winning 32 more delegates than Clinton tomorrow. If that happens, Hillary is in even further trouble than expected.

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?dia ryId=3843

Btw, I happen to think Hillary's health care plan and rhetoric is deception. If she really cares about UHC, then why doesn't she drop the lobbyist money she's taken from the pharmaceutical companies?

unavailable for comment?

Obviously, Bill Clinton was exciting. However, he's not running for President.  Nice Non-Objective Clinton Coverage.  

"The crowd is really rapt with attention, and clapping often at what is a pretty densely packed policy speech. They really seem to love him, an amazing thing considering most of these people were only a few years old when he became president."

Careful there, or you'll end up getting yourself and other Clinton supporters labeled as "cultists".

</snark>

If Obama goes on to win the nomination, I won't mind a bit if Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers and Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas bask in the glory by reminding us that years ago, they were making the case that the stale, old-style DLC-insider campaign consultants were leading the Democratic Party down the wrong path.  

Those are the people that Hillary hired, and $175 million later they have a shitty campaign that is falling further behind every day.  When this is over somebody is going to write the book on how the Clintons started out with a huge pot of money and every conceivable structural advantage and still managed to piss it all away.

Bill Clinton is probably the strongest reason I have not been supporting Hillary.  Aside from the more minor problems wtih his tenure as president, this stands out as such a moral failure, it really spoke to his character more than anything else I can think of:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalga mes?pid=1353  

It's a good article on his failure to address the genocide in Rwanda, and his lies about it; every bit as impressive (although not as costly for the United States) as the lies Bush has told about Iraq.

This site is so biased towards Hillary.

Oh my. I cannot for the life of me understand how all of a sudden up is down and left is right. Bill Clinton is now a former horrible president that ruined the country. Hmmm...that's a new narrative that I've only heard employed by Obama supporters and Obama himself. Funny, because even the wingnuts weren't using that insult. They knew how foolish it was since the country loves Bill Clinton and loved him when he left office.

Suddenly, he's the Democratic pariah because his wife dares challenge the heir to JFK, MLK, RFK, and Jesus combined. I've only heard baseless accusations about Whitewater, Rich and all the rest from wingnuts. Nice to see the Great Uniter has succeeded in making "Democrats" and "Progressive" spew right wing hate toward a beloved former President for the sake of winning a primary race.  Oh yeah, and now he's not charming or a great speaker or anything. MyDD is obviously slanted toward HRC if you point out what people have been saying for 20 years...that Bill Clinton is a great speaker. Suddenly, that's also not true.  My Lord. I've never seen anything like this in my life.

Bill says of Hillary that the reason to vote for her is: "she's a world-class change-maker"

Where's the evidence of this, exactly?  Name a significant change that Hillary is personally responsible for.  Legislation that passed in the Clinton administration does not count unless she had an important role in making it.

I just don't see it.  Talking this way highlights for me the problem she has.  If she wants to say she's seen more of Washington than Obama, there's no doubt she has.  But that's not making change all by itself.

And, honestly, I think she really has a lot to answer for on the vote.  It was 2002 - she wasn't up for re-election for four years, and she was in one of the safest districts there is.  If she were a Dem who had to run in GA or NE in 2002, I'd have sympathy.  Some things you just have to do.  But she doesn't have that excuse.  People say that Obama's stand doesn't count, but really, she wasn't in a much different situation politically.

Sadly, I think it's the same instinct that led her to sign on for a flag-burning amendment, to vote against a ban on cluster bombs, and to speak out against retroactive relief for people sentenced under the disproportionate federal guidelines - she's just too worried about being blasted from the right on cultural issues or "toughness" issues.  

I think it's unlikely she's going to shake this habit, and the more Democratic members we can put in Congress, the more likely it is we'll have a successful Presidency.  That's another reason she worries me - the idea that her campaign just conceded all the red states without building an organization I find baffling.  Is this a preview of how she plans to run in the general?  

I acknowledge I could be wrong - she says she's ready to fight now, and she's taken a more aggressive posture on health care.  Maybe this will be the issue she'll fight hard on, and she'll fight smarter than she did in 1994 (for those of you old enough to remember that, it hurt a lot to lose that fight and then watch Newt Gingrich become speaker).  I do know that if she wins the primary I - and every Obama supporter I know - will be pulling hard for her in the general election and hoping that she'll do it.  

But please don't tell me she has a record as a world-class maker of change.

So many people hit with political amnesia.  Bill and Hillary Clinton were not perfect, by the nature of the game they CAN not be all things to all people.  

I am still amazed at how quickly democrats have turned on them.  Anyway- thanks for your post- I am new to commenting - but have read your blog for sometime.  I will make it part of my daily routine.  Nice work-

Clinton's are the Rasputin of political campaigns. You can kill 'em six different ways but they don't go down. I respect the fighting.

Also George Mason? They really wanted me to go there for law school. I got like 8 letters from them and never sent them anything. But I couldn't.... I couldn't make myself go to a place without winter.

So what's the official MYDD meme for tonight to spin Clinton losses?

All 3 contests are primaries, so you can't blame the caucus "activists".  Maryland is a traditional democratic state that democrats would need to hold in November, unlike Obama's "red state" victories. And Virginia, a quite good sized state, is on the cusp of turning blue and a significant battleground for democrats. Will it be all those BMW driving, latte swilling african american voters? Just asking.

Gee- Perhaps the animus that the Clintons' generate is precisely the reason Hillary's candidacy was bad for the Party to begin with. It's natural that when an ex-president is actively campaigning for his wife to become president based on "her experience" that ALL of our ambivilance towards him and them past and present is brought to the surface.

There is no way to avoid it. And it will not stop. If she wins, it will be 8 years of it.

Of course they will come after Obama.  I don't think that anyone who supports him doubts that that will happen.  I just happen to think that he's actually better positioned to take it on from a rhetorical and organizational standpoint.  

Let's not forget:  BC won elections where a sizable portion of the population voted for Ross Perot.  

I know someone who saw Edwards in St. Paul the night before he dropped out -- He looked energized as well.

These folks are political pros who know how to turn it on.  A high energy presentation tells you exactly -- nothing.

Clinton came to Eureka, CA in January 16...and gave what sounds like a similar speech.  If people want to know the content of what he says...I've transcribed it.  I transcribed EVERY WORD so that any reader can be confident I didn't make changes to make him look better or worse.  In my opinion, he makes a compelling case regarding Hillary's vision, plan, qualifications, personal qualifications!

You can read it at an easy-to-download .pdf file.

http://www.sonic.net/~stepnext/CLINTON/E UREKA.pdf

One of Bill Clinton's main points...

CLINTON:  "It's been seriously argued in this campaign that anybody that fought for you before this election date should be eliminated from
consideration for the presidency...because they are somehow tainted by the past....  Do we really believe that if you've done something for other people in your public life...you should be eliminated from being considered for the presidency of the United States.  I don't think so.  I don't think so!"