Goalposts Moving

Hillary Clinton's campaign is very much talking about going on to Pennsylvania absent a blowout on March 4.

The Obama campaign and its allies are outspending us two to one in paid media and have sent more staff into the March 4 states. In fact, when all is totaled, Senator Obama and his allies have outspent Senator Clinton by a margin of $18.4 million to $9.2 million on advertising in the four states that are voting next Tuesday.

Senator Obama has campaigned hard in these states. He has spent time meeting editorial boards, courting endorsers, holding rallies, and - of course - making speeches.

If he cannot win all of these states with all this effort, there's a problem.

Should Senator Obama fail to score decisive victories with all of the resources and effort he is bringing to bear, the message will be clear:

Democrats, the majority of whom have favored Hillary in the primary contests held to date, have their doubts about Senator Obama and are having second thoughts about him as a prospective standard-bearer.

That's a somewhat spurious claim which cannot be sufficiently challenged, that she has won the "majority of Democrats." It's based on exit polls which have a substantial margin of error. Furthermore, this just treats Democrats like idiots, which they probably don't favor.

The Clinton campaign has been on all sides of this issue. They said it was a delegate fight. Then they said that only primary states mattered. Now it's that Obama has to win 15 states in a row to prove that Democrats aren't afraid of having him as the nominee.

The candidate is so much better than this lazy and insulting spin.

P.S. Does this mean that if Clinton only wins Rhode Island, where she's up comfortably, she'd move on to Pennsylvania because clearly Democrats are having second thoughts?

UPDATE: Here's that Clinton ad I was talking about before.



This is good news for John McCain, as his broke campaign can simply throw his "I approve this message" tag on the back end and use it throughout the fall.

Obama has responded by saying "I will never see the threat of terrorism as a way to scare up votes." Mark Penn's response? It's a positive ad!