The Dish

On the money, I’d say:

Clinton won Pennsylvania for two key reasons: Only Democrats could vote in the primary, and the Keystone State electorate is dominated by the elderly, who are staunchly for Clinton. Despite her claims of electability, Hillary has never done well among independent voters. And Obama usually loses the Democrats. Pennsylvania’s closed-primary rules gave her a key advantage.

Older voters are flocking to Clinton as fears mount of what Obama might do as president. But those under 45 – less focused, perhaps, on race – are moving toward Obama. Here, that split helped her.

Does anyone believe that the big difference in voting patterns between the young and the old have nothing to do with residual racial attitudes?

Unfortunately, Ross is probably right about Kmiec’s musings on the 95/10 plan:

…while I would be delighted to see Obama endorse the plan, since it’s always nice to have pro-choice politicians on the record suggesting that abortion is a bad thing and we ought to have less of it, I have a tough time seeing it happening…I suspect that Obama simply doesn’t have enough feminist cred to even tiptoe off the liberal reservation on abortion. But I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

Part of what’s coming. McCain doesn’t like it. He has more integrity than the Clintons:

Fingerprinting goes global. One of the worst effects of 9/11 and governmental response to it has been to treat all travelers and tourists as potential criminals. But the US has pioneered this authoritarian approach to immigrants and tourists and travelers. The world follows.

Thought-controlled video gaming.

The chatter suggests that California’s State Supreme Court may mandate equal marriage rights in June. The governor has said he’ll abide by the court; the legislature has already voted to extend civil marriage to gay couples twice. But those who believe that gay couples are a threat to social stability and to heterosexual families have managed to get enough signatures to get a measure on the ballot this fall that would ban all such marriages. It would effectively forcibly divorce all those gay couples who got married in June by November.

In the middle of this campaign, we could be facing a major civil rights battle – in which all the major candidates oppose equality for gay couples. Those of us who do not believe that our relationships are evil or destructive of society had better get our armor on. The attack is imminent.

They’re the core Clinton constituency, and she’s holding on to them:

Per the exit polls, 47% of the Pennsylvania Democratic electorate last night was made up of white women, higher than any other race/gender subgroup. Clinton ended up winning them by more than 30 points, 66%-34%; in Ohio, she won this group, 67%-31%.

A reader writes:

The reason why Hillary is fighting so hard to get the Democratic nomination despite the long odds against her is that winning it this year is tantamount to being elected president.  The Democratic candidate’s chances are so good this year and the Republican’s are so bad that it is virtually a slam dunk.  This being the case, it makes total sense for Hillary to fight until the bitter end and hope that lightning will strike.

In every other year of the postwar era except 1964, the Democrat’s chances were no better than 50-50 and usually a little worse regardless of who the candidates were.  That is because of various factors such as the bias in the Electoral College toward so-called red states and the propensity of voters to favor gridlock during an era when Democrats mostly controlled Congress.  So it is a rare phenomenon for the Democratic nomination to have as much value as it has this year.

I suspect that if the Democratic Party’s chances were closer to average, Hillary would be much more inclined to drop out.  If McCain had a real shot at winning, she might figure that dropping out gracefully might give her an easy ride to the nomination in 2012 were he to win.  But of course, if Obama wins he will be the Democratic nominee that year, meaning that 2016 would be the next time she could run again—much too late given her age, I would think.

Therefore, it is now or never.  That’s why she cannot concede.

Clinton has gained a whopping 5 delegates’ advantage (including supers) over Obama. The current scored-card is 1,716 to 1,588. On March 18, the differential was 133. It’s now 128.

Marc analyzes the state of the race:

The argument, incidentally, isn’t that because Obama didn’t win Pennsylvania in the primary, he can’t win it in the general. It’s that the coalition Obama is building in these states cannot, without a significant modification, give him victory in the fall. The corresponding argument is that it will be easier for Clinton to expand her coalition.

It seems to me that what this primary has shown is how vulnerable Obama may be to the classic Rove attack on an elite, gay, black, alien, commie snob terrorist. When this attack was legitimized by a fellow Democrat, and after a self-inflicted wound, and in a state full of Reagan Democrats, he turned out to be vulnerable, and will remain vulnerable, until the boomer generation fades somewhat. And weirdly, Ms Hillary Wellesley Rodham, Ms "more ecstatic modes of living," Ms "I could always stay home and bake cookies," has somehow managed to pass herself off as a tribune of the plebs, the Roseanne Barr of the new millenium. It’s 1968 again, and she’s Daley now and Obama’s Abbie Hoffman. One could laugh, I guess. But the Clintons can become anything, say anything, coopt anything, as long as they retain power that way.

The question for the fall, if Clinton were to capsize the Democrats, repel black and young voters from politics for a generation, and grapple successfully for the nomination, is whether the same tactics that she has adopted could be used in exactly the same way against her.

I see no reason why not. You think that Limbaugh, having come to Clinton’s rescue, would actually not turn against her in the fall? And once you have ceded the Limbaugh logic, you can hardly complain. Discussing the, er, war or economy, is a blinding distraction from the far more important question of whether a candidate is truly a "real American" or a "regular person" or not. And it may be difficult for the Clintons to pivot away from that. It will certainly be difficult for them to run against a war they both supported against a candidate they have already hailed as more qualified than a fellow Democrat.

Obama, however, does have the option of trying to make this campaign about the war, the economy, the environment and the Constitution.

On all those issues, the case for throwing every Republican out of office and punishing one of the worst performances of any party in power for several generations is compelling. In the last six weeks, it must be said, he has been distracted by the Clinton onslaught, and lost the critical unifying, trans-partisan reform message that made his candidacy so inspiring. He has lost focus and some nerve. It’s understandable faced with the Clinton machine and the Clinton will. But he now has to show that he is not merely calm under pressure, but focused.

He has two weeks to remind us what his candidacy means, what the last eight years have done to us, and what he can uniquely bring to the presidency – in terms of America and the world – to repair the wound. Yes, he must keep emphasizing policy as well. But his core advantage and rationale is the need for Obama in the moment in world history that we are confronting. He has lost that focus. He cannot run from his identity; he has to embrace it. If he doesn’t regain that argument soon, the thousand carps and doubts will grow in number. And the White House will remain in Republican hands.