Well it probably means that Barack and Hillary will be tearing strips off each other, while GOP frontrunner John McCain is able to communicate directly to the nation,

I disagree with this. If Republicans are not tearing into each other, then they’re not in the news. It means the Democrat candidates are in the news and more recently they’ve toned down the rhetoric and attacks because the Democrat base retaliated against it.

So, like Howard Dean, I think its a good thing the race amngst Dems is nto finished yet. He was on TV saying that and I think he means it. It means more people get more time to listen to their policies. Besides, it also means both Dems have to try harder to travel to different states and reach out to people. All this increases their visibility and rallies the base.

Also, we’ve also seen enough of Hillary, and Bill for that matter, to know that they haven’t forgotten how to fight like rabid ally cats. Obama, for all his righteous notions of a new politics, will have little option but to descend to the Clinton’s level if he’s to have any hope of surviving another salvo of negative campaigning.

Missing ‘e’, missing ’self-’, and misplaced apostrophe. But otherwise I’d agree…

However, I think an extended Dem contest is not all good news for McCain, because (assuming he gets the nomination) he’s going to have to delay his own negative campaigning until his opponent is chosen. He can’t spend the next 4 months banging on about the iniquities of late 1990s sleaze among the Democrats, because if Obama gets the nomination it’ll all be a lot of wasted effort.

And I know this is probably not a new point in these comment threads, but aren’t some of Obama’s supporters (if not the man himself) reminiscent of the zeal for the Third Way? New Politics? New Abstract Nouns (as Simon Hoggart might say). Which would of course make him a political descendant of Bill…

OK, that all sounded a bit Grinchy. How about this

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/02/democrats-and-u.html

for a more cheerful perspective? (Most of the bloggers there are Obama supporters, and make his case well in other posts.)

Hi Sunny,

They have toned down the rhetoric recently. But do you really think the Clinton crowd will continue to play nice if things start to go against them in the coming States? Do you really think the Clintons’ are prepared to lose? If both candidates resort to muck-raking, who knows what shape the winner will be in come the summer?

Of course having a race raises the profile of the candidates, although I’m not sure, what with 24-hr rolling news, getting attention for Obama or Hillary is going to be a problem.

hellblazer,

That’ll teach me to write something late at night without proofing.

Obama third way? Yeah, I think so.

Clinton will end up playing dirty again, no doubt…only this time I see it happening because Obama will be the one going on the defensive. If Obama’s team get it right Clinton will end up looking defensive and desperate, but play it wrong and they sully the whole race. But as Sunny said, the Republican race isn’t over and the Democrats continually being in the news can only be a good thing.

It’ll be interesting to see the next set of polls for sure, but I think the Democrats came out better from Super Tuesday. They haven’t changed their position here, there are two candidates that people think could do the job well, regardless of who they support…republicans on the other hand found that their party is the one deeply divided with concerns over McCain’s conservatism or Hucakbee’s religiousness. They’re the ones conflicted and that is what the Democrats need given how much both of them are talking about unifying, though especially Obama.

Also, Obama is currently 5 pledged delegates ahead of Clinton, and that looks unlikely to change too drastically. He was something like 40 pledged delegates behind Clinton before Tuesday so he has made up a lot of ground, and Hillary only looks to be in such a confident position because of super delegates. I firmly believe that Obama came out points winner, he won marginally more delegates, we won more states, and importantly he won in states with high female turn out and took large swathes of the white vote in states with no african americans.

The only thing Obama has to be careful of is how much of his good standing came from absentee ballots already cast for Edwards that may have switched to Clinton if they had the chance, but other than that the momentum is completely with him, and it amazes me that I’m still reading in places that Clinton is the one ahead. Propaganda eh?

Good piece Aaron, I was actually going to write something very similar for Pickled Politics. Seems to me that the Democrats indecision could hand the GoP the Presidency. Getting bogged down in ‘historical choices’ may in fact lose them the chance to make actual history if they’re not careful.

If I were Dem voters in the remaining states I’d think long and hard about the pertinent question of who can beat McCain in November, Hilary or Barack?