Category: The Dish

This has to be the most emotionally jarring blog I have ever read. It is by an anonymous, suicidal woman who is chronicling the last 90 days of her life. Today is day 83. Ryan Stewart thinks its a "put on."

Gal Beckerman on the campaigns’ competing narratives:

The story [the Clinton camp] wanted told was that these were easy and obvious wins for Obama, and so we shouldn’t really make a big deal out of them. Meanwhile, Obama’s people were trying to tamp down expectations that he would do so well, hoping that it would be played big when he did.

Well, you can judge for yourself this morning who won in this narrative battle. It’s clear from all the headlines with the words “surge” and “sweep,” not to mention the New York Post’s reliably histrionic, “WHAM BAM,” that Obama got the better of Clinton on this critical front.

Lots of you felt it wasn’t negative at all. Paul Waldman agrees:

While lots of people complain about how dirty and nasty today’s campaigns are, candidates today might as well be firing cannons filled with nerf balls compared to what used to go on. Andrew Jackson’s opponents distributed pamphlets accusing him of being "a gambler, a cock fighter, a slave trader and the husband of a really fat wife." Now that’s some negative campaigning! Or how about Karl Rove spreading rumors that his client’s opponent was a pedophile? Ah, the good old days. […]

I suppose the problem at the moment for Clinton is that the story she’s been telling about Obama all along – that he doesn’t match her on experience, toughness, and policy chops — doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. But if she’s going to set aside that argument, it has to be replaced with something. This is just one ad, of course. But it’s hard to discern exactly why Clinton thinks voters should reject Obama and choose her instead.

For the first time, Obama leads.

A reader asks:

Senator McCain, why don’t we still have troops in Vietnam?

Fighting words from Arnold Kling:

Which do you think takes a bigger toll on the environment, owning a dog, or owning an SUV? My bet would be on the dog. I’m thinking of all of the resources that go into dog food.

Rebuttals in the comments here and here:

My dog presumably values his life a lot more than an SUV values its existence.

My dog creates plenty of negative externalities (barking, excreting, etc.) but also many positive externalities. Walking a cute dog in a big city I am constantly stopped by people who want to pet him and walk away smiling. He facilitates interaction between strangers, which is important for neighborliness and very rare in crowded cities. In contrast, I rarely see people who stop and touch an SUV, smile at the owner and walk away happier.

Gallup’s latest:

Is he testing the waters for an endorsement?

Jay Cost:

It is hard to identify a momentum effect here. Clinton’s losses in the contests are as explicable as any of her losses before or on Super Tuesday. Obama has systematically won states that play to his particular strengths since the Iowa caucus. So has Clinton. Her problem has been that she has not had any good states in the last week.

And yet … campaigns are dynamic things, and momentum matters. Obama has the time to make the sell – something that he lacked in the Super Tuesday states.

"Bad weather would be adverse for a lot of Senator Clinton’s voters who are senior citizens,"  – Mark Penn.