Thursday, January 31, 2008

The Dean: Obama Abides

It's not often I read The Dean anymore, but I did this morning, and I found his conclusion about the Democratic nomination pretty interesting as well as counter-intuitive. It wasn't what I was expecting someone like The Dean to say:

On the Democratic side, the battle is closer, but the advantage has shifted back to Barack Obama -- thanks to a growing but largely unremarked-upon tendency among Democratic leaders to reject Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president.

The New York senator could still emerge from the "Tsunami Tuesday" voting with the overall lead in delegates, but she is unlikely to come close to clinching the nomination. And the longer the race goes on, the better the chances Obama will prevail as more Democratic elected officials and candidates come to view him as the better bet to defeat McCain in November.

To begin reading the column is to sense that one is being led down the path of proclaiming Hillary's inevitability. He begins with the emerging sense that on the GOP side, it's McCain's nomination to lose, then on to the Democratic side where I imagined The Dean would salute Obama's galent and historic effort, but then say the one-term Senator from the Land of Lincoln oughta just hang 'em up. But he goes off in an entirely different direction. Maybe the Kennedy endorsements are having an influence.

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