After Senator Barack Obama convincingly won the Potomac Primary yesterday, is it time to start selling tickets to the Fall of the House of Clinton, as some wags call it?
Or have the reports of their death been grossly exaggerated?
RealClearPolitics’ resident political scientist and number-cruncher Jay Cost says: wait a minute, chaps. Take it easy with the claims of Obama momentum and inevitability.
Clinton’s losses in the contests are as explicable as any of her losses before or on Super Tuesday. Obama has systematically won states that play to his particular strengths since the Iowa caucus. So has Clinton. Her problem has been that she has not had any good states in the last week.
Of course, he says, there may indeed be momentum kicking in for Obama. It’s just that, given the data, the momentum effect is presently “undetectable.”
Cost analyzes the demographics of the upcoming states and reckons that the advantages for each candidate come out as a wash.
All in all, this implies a rough parity from here until the end of the primary season. Approximately speaking, neither candidate seems to have an advantage in the remaining contests. So, my suggestion to readers is not to get caught up in the "Obama is inevitable" storyline. Minimally, we should all remember how well the "Clinton is inevitable" storyline worked out five months ago!
But for those of us who are not Democrats the spectacle of the Democratic Party tying itself up in knots over race and gender is long overdue poetic justice. (See Maureen Dowd)
As it says in the Bible: Those who live by identity politics will die by identity politics.
At least, it would have said that if modern identity politics had been invented back then.
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