Updated - An afterthought on Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is a quasi-Democratic machine state. Thus one expected the machine-backed candidate, Hillary Clinton, to do well with the most established demographics there: Whites and older citizens.

No doubt then that Hillary's expected win on Tuesday (nine points) and her turning-the-tide spin generated a round of media ridicule and explicit reference to the Pennsylvania machine-state status, minimizing the significance of the Clinton victory. Not what happened.

As Chuck Todd: (Hardball, April 7) had put it, "...Pennsylvania is a machine state. You know it‘s a machine democratic state. It is an old school machine state and she has the entire machine behind her, other than the Casey family. She‘s got the state party officially behind her."

via MAL Contends - crossposted at Kos -

Update: Many readers have asked: Why are you quoting TNR? Good question. TNR is good on fiscal policy; and I believe this crap by Judis needs to be knocked down. [But I promise never to even bother with Jason Zengerle who is pure shit.] But Salon is pushing this story too, though more judiciously, in Michael Lind’s piece]. Update II: Maybe Hillary, Judis and Co are on to something; even Patrick Buchanan agrees with them.

John B. Judis knows better.

His piece in The New Republic, Woe Is He, asserts the necessity of the Democratic nominee garnering the white working class demographic.

via MAL Contends

When an American politician in the presidential general election campaign says his/her opponent is out-of-the-mainstream, it's a lie.

The losing opponent will garner at least some 45 percent of the vote, disconfirming out-of-the-mainstream status, though election votes are imprecise indicators of public opinion.

The complex reality of the American political culture sees support for universal health care, social security for our seniors, full employment, as well as a mass base for fascism, racist policies at home, a decided antipathy to civil liberties, and near-genocidal wars of aggression abroad, amid what can most accurately be described as a depoliticized electorate.

But the he's-not-like-us charge is aimed at the person; a personal attack that the opponent is somehow alien, out-of-touch, different, elitist, not-of-this-culture, even malicious and the related charge that he/she is dangerous and unpredictable.

Update: A reader left this comment worth posting: "Hillary is a political succubus. She will suck the energy and will from this party until we are broken and defeated. ... Even if one does not consider the supposedly inflammatory nature of the Wright sermons, she took an opportunity to promote healing or at least thought provoking discussion, and instead parroted a line that even the conservative nominee and the man he defeated has abandoned. ... I have no doubt Hillary would have left her church and the place that introduced her to Jesus because it is abundantly clear that there is no belief, no ethic, no moral, or important relationship she would not gladly sacrifice in order to further her own naked ambition."

Hillary Clinton has gone blind.

Update: BREAKING NEWS: NBC News confirms Geraldine Ferraro leaving Clinton campaign

Keith Olbermann on Hillary and Geraldine Ferraro's appeals to racism. See:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/23601329#23601329

via MAL Contends

Hillary Clinton's evolving attacks to define and brand Barack Obama involve what advertising and marketing professionals call impressions—the projection of one image (in this case Barack Obama) onto one human brain (a voter).

Designing and managing Obama’s brand by generating impressions for the benefit of Hillary running in the primary, it is necessary to merge negative (ostensibly plausible) aspects of Obama onto the consciousness of key voting demographics susceptible to certain appeals based on fear and xenophobia.

The more frequent and emotionally potent the impression, the greater is the political impact.

In the card game contract bridge, there is an old saying that guides players attempting to make contracts when the partner (and it's always the partner) has a few too many, and bids a seemingly unmakeable contract.

You have to play the game like the cards are where you want them.

In this way, a player might be able to make a contract (successfully scoring points in the game), though the hands dealt would not indicate likely contract-winning cards.

That's what Hillary is doing in the Democratic primary. She is adapting this occasional bridge imperative to her campaign, most recently thought dead after the Wisconsin primary.

She knows she cannot win on popular vote, pledged delegates, number of states won, and so on; so she plots a path to the nomination with the needed assumption that the political cards will be where she needs them to be.

But bridge is not a Rovian game.

In bridge, you don't change the rules in the middle, and though it's extremely competitive, bridge is a well-mannered game where you don't make up and say bad things about your opponents, and you never cheat.

Update: John Nichols: A Baldwin shift to Obama could send crucial message

Voters in US Rep. Tammy Baldwin’s 2nd congressional district in Wisconsin on Feb. 19 delivered a resounding victory to Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton—65 to 34 percent.

As a superdelegate, Rep. Baldwin has pledged her support behind Hillary Clinton.

Now Clinton has engaged in unrelenting negative attacks on Obama using the Republican tactics of personal destruction, dubbed the “kitchen sink” strategy. [See Dear Hillary, We're Breaking Up for an instructive overview.]

In this despicable enterprise, Clinton is destined to fail, but not without first doing a lot of harm.

Obama advocates (especially voters in Wisconsin prideful that their state is the turning point in the destruction of Hillary’s Democratic coalition) concerned about the recent pro-McCain coverage on CNN and MSNBC as a precursor of biased media treatment to come can relax.

McCain is a fatally weak GOP candidate to face Obama, and it’s likely that many GOP movement wingers see him as a 2008 sacrificial sheep happily slaughtered to the 2012-2016 gods.

There's no open talk from GOP insiders of course, but there is a secret let-McCain-fall program: Call it McCainCon [a play on the secret EComCon conspiracy from the Seven Days in May movie based on the Fletcher Knebel- Charles W. Bailey II book].

I'm suggesting a plot by conservative movement officers to sabotage the GOP nominee for president of the United States.

And conservatives need only participate with faint energy in the campaign to add their support to this McCainCon conspiracy, watching a man they dislike take the fall in a Goldwateresque election for the GOP.

Consider some structural election facts and Democratic capabilities.

Update: From Larry Eichel of the Philadelphia Inquirer  

(Clinton's) 17-point loss in Wisconsin was a huge development, said Dante Scala, a political scientist from the University of New Hampshire.

Until Wisconsin, he said, Clinton had won primaries wherever her base of working-class women, seniors and Hispanics was inherently stronger than Obama's coalition of young people, blacks and upscale progressives.

"To use a tennis analogy, both candidates had been holding serve," Scala said during a talk at Villanova University last week. "Wisconsin was a breaking of serve." …

There's also the generational factor. "Maybe people don't want another baby boomer, another Clinton or Bush," said Doug Hansmann, a Clinton supporter from Madison, Wis. "The irony is that of the two Clintons and two Bushes, I think she's the best of the bunch."

'Setting the stage, poised for a knockout ... a fading, faltering, broken Hillary Clinton campaign': Everyone has read the ledes reporting on Barack Obama’s landslide win in Wisconsin Tuesday.

One aspect has been overlooked: In a critical dimension, it’s not Clinton or Obama who won or lost.

The people spoke and thus won. And one fact that bears noting is that Hillary Clinton supporters are more idealistic than she is.

In speaking to Clinton supporters the last week, the take-away is that Hillary has the requisite mettle and wisdom to successfully lead this country to social justice.

But Hillary did not speak for these people in her relentlessly negative (and false) ads and mailers that sought merely to stave off the 17-point defeat that she suffered here.

Hillary found out just how repugnant the politics of fear and distortion is among voters, including many of her supporters, who see the democratic process as a means of their deciding their government's policies.

Does Hillary believe that her supporters wish her campaign to assassinate Obama’s character, abilities and commitment? Noone I know was consulted.