The Dish

Charlotte Allen digs deeper.

McAuliffe just echoed Ickes on this odd term on Hardball. It’s clearly the new Clinton meme.

The Obama camp puts this previous Clinton statement into the mix:

“I was shocked when I learned Iowa and Mississippi have never elected a woman governor, senator or member of Congress. There has got to be something at work here. How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi? That’s not the quality. That’s not the communitarianism, that’s not the openness I see in Iowa.”

And the beat goes on.

Some skepticism against Weigel.

Their governors demand that their delegates be seated. You could see this coming. It’s the only way the Clintons can get back to the White House. And rules are for non-Clintons.

A very shrewd move by the Clintons, according to this reader:

Everyone’s buzzing about Hillary’s "superticket" talk today.  Clearly that’s a strategic campaign move for her, and is in no way a part of her oft-hidden gracious nature.  If she can convince enough people that it’s a strong possibility for her to choose Obama as VP, she can stem the flow of on-the-fencers and cause them to lean her way.  Because with her, they get a chance at having it both ways!  And that’s a guiltless, easy win-win choice for an undecided voter to make.  Conversely, Obama hasn’t mentioned her as a possibility, which could start hurting him when it comes down the undecideds he’s got to move in the coming primaries.

Some fresh polling data: a tiny majority of Californians support marriage rights (49 to 46). A massive majority (64 to 32) favors either civil unions or civil marriages. I say: no court pre-empting of this astonishing achievement in democratic persuasion.

Drum says for everyone to "chill out":

I’d like to offer a historical counterexample: 1968. Consider. The Democratic incumbent president was forced to withdraw after a primary debacle in New Hampshire. The Vietnam War had split liberals into warring factions and urban riots had shattered the LBJ’s Great Society legacy. A frenzied primary season reached all the way to California in June, culminating in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The Democratic Convention in Chicago was a nationally televised battle zone. Hubert Humphrey, the party’s eventual nominee, had never won a primary and was loathed by a significant chunk of the liberal community. New Left radicals hated mainstream Democrats more than they hated Republicans.

In other words, this was the mother of all ugly, party-destroying campaigns. No other primary campaign in recent memory from either party has come within a million light years of being as fratricidal and ruinous. But what happened? In the end, Humphrey lost the popular vote to Nixon by less than 1%. A swing of about a hundred thousand votes in California would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives.

Nyhan counters:

This is all true, but it’s important to remember that Humphrey drastically underperformed in 1968 relative to what we would expect given the state of the economy at the time (a result that is often attributed to Vietnam War deaths). We can’t quantify what damage was done by the polarizing primary campaign, but it’s hard to see how it would help.

Democrats risk a similar scenario — a destructive primary campaign could turn a possible rout in November into a 50/50 coin flip a la 1968. And even if they do win, any significant reduction in the popular/electoral vote margin could have significant legislative and political consequences going forward.

A reader notes:

Are you listening to Harold Ickes on NPR "Talk of the Nation" today? He is saying that the distinction between pledged or "automatic" (as he is calling super delegates) is a "phony distinction" that the Obama campaign wants to put forward to serve their ends. That many of the super delegates are congressmen who are elected every 2 years. He keeps restating this "phony distinction phrase." I’m appalled and wanted to pass this on.

If you knew Ickes’ record, you would, alas, not be appalled. He has a Blumenthal-level of say-anythingness.

You can sense a change in the left-liberal blogosphere. They have now become quite virulently anti-Clinton. As often, Kos leads the pack. Part of me wonders whether the Clintons understand this. They don’t care much for the netroots, to put it mildly, and the large influx of new Obama voters and new small Obama donors into the Democratic party is terribly threatening to them.

So it’s win-win for them by going comprehensively negative on Obama. If they can throw enough dirt and fear in his direction, they could either win the nomination (by peeling off enough white ethnics and then talking the super-delegates into switching), or help McCain defeat Obama in the fall. Then they get bragging rights (we told you a black man couldn’t win), assume that McCain is a one-term president, and gear up for a second attempt at restoration in 2012, having consigned the Obama insurrection to history.