Smackdown Saturday

Tonight Obama dominated Clinton in Nebraska, Washington, Louisiana, and the Virgin Islands. He can be expected to gather huge momentum heading into the Chesapeake primaries of Virginia, DC, and Maryland.

Clinton's shred of hope this dismal weekend is to throw up a small roadblock by winning in Maine. New England has been good to her so far, so it's not far fetched to see her pull it off; however, the Obama bandwagon is kicking into high gear now. A victory in Maine would be small but very significant, showing that he really is working the momentum to his consistent advantage. Assuming that he mows through Maine and the Chesapeake states, then it's looking like Clinton will have to make a last stand in Ohio and Texas. That's really where the showdown is going to be. As I said before, Obama is going to need to prove himself in a big, delegate rich state to establish his national worthiness. Clinton is simply trying to avoid the technical knockout, and if she could take Texas and Ohio, she'd be reestablished as a comeback kid. Expect her to campaign for the rest of February as the plucky underdog, fighting the biased media and the ObamaZombies. The question is, will she be able to stay standing without going negative on Obama. If the opposition researchers have any mud to sling, it better be now, and they better be six degrees of separation away from Clinton before they launch the dirt bombs. If the nastiness can be traced back to the source, the blowback is going to hurt her bigtime.

I think Clinton's campaign strategy must have been to have this thing locked in on Super Tuesday. It didn't work. The inevitable candidate has been framed as yesterday's news. The new kid in town is grabbing the headlines and he has the mojo.

Expect Texas and Ohio to be the ultimate contest. I can't see how Clinton could survive losing both states. If Obama wins only one, maybe Clinton survives until the Pennsylvania primary. If Obama should lose both, then his campaign would be badly punctured, and a loss in Pennsylvania could prove fatal to his hopes. The problem for Clinton is going to be, how do you regain the momentum? Obama's going to be able to match her dollar for dollar. His rallies are only going to get bigger. Unless he turns into a toad during a debate, and unless there's some phantom lurking in the closet; how does she reshape the narrative in her favor? The Clintons have always been master spin doctors, but for me the spin cycle is over. It's so 90's. We've been there before.

Obama's campaign offers something that Howard Dean's 2004 campaign anticipated but couldn't quite deliver on -- a bona fide grassroots, internet fueled, get out the vote juggernaut. You see it in action at these caucuses and your jaw drops. We forgot what democracy was supposed to look like. All these people showing up. Thousands of boots on the ground, coming together online and offline to make it happen. How could a wavering democratic super delegate not see this and say, damn, I want in on that.

At this point, I do not sense any shift in momentum away from Obama. The surge is building. The margins of victory are widening. The political tide turning. The same cannot be said for the John McCain campaign, which appears to have sputtered on its way to the nomination. My theory is this: the more the country gets to know Obama, the more his ads run, the more the momentum builds. And if he can win a decisive victory on March 4, especially in Ohio, the swingiest of swing states, the nomination should go to him. He'll have earned it.