I'm certainly no fan of Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter. Nooners wells up with self-importance every week, usually offering some condescending riff on Democrats who "don't get" some "vital American character trait" or some such nonsense. But she often mixes a few good insights alongside the drivel. And in the middle of a column about Obama's race innoculating him from character attacks in the general election (yeah, right), she includes this important but largely forgotten observation:
Mrs. Clinton is losing this thing. It's not one big primary, it's a rolling loss, a daily one, an inch-by-inch deflation. The trends and indices are not in her favor.
The larger article is filled with over-the-top references to Clinton's Rasputin-like refusal to lose gracefully. But the quote about "rolling losses" is a very important one that we need to keep in mind.
Expectations gaming aside, Barack Obama is heavily favored to win at least 6 of the 8 primaries and caucuses this month. He should sweep Washington, Nebraska and Louisiana tomorrow. The positive media narrative and his organizational savvy may be enough to put him over the top in Maine's caucuses. Even if it doesn't, he can explain away his loss to the demographics of Maine. And besides, Maine doesn't have many delegates. But then there's the Potomac primary. The media will be all over it because, after all, most of the political media lives in DC, Maryland or Virginia. Their own self-importance will inflate the significance of Obama's almost-certain large victory there on Tuesday.
Think about what happens to the overall narrative at that point. It isn't just that Obama will have just won 6 or 7 states. It's that he won them right in a row following a dead heat on Super Tuesday. The momentum will help him in favorable Hawaii and neutral Wisconsin on February 19. A string of victories will have a cascading effect. He starts to appear inevitable and undecided voters who like both candidates will finally fall in line behind the frontrunner. And that includes people in Texas and Ohio.
But here's another important point that nobody's mentioning: primary fatigue. We Democrats are getting tired of the primary season. The Republicans have already settled on John McCain. And while they have to figure out how to repair their damaged base, at least they have a candidate. On the Democratic side we have two compelling candidates with lots of support. More importantly, we have lots of Democrats who like both candidates and just want this primary to end so we can start taking on John McCain. Many of us have primary fatigue and are desperate for this phase of the campaign to end.
I think this is why momentum and inevitability matter so much more in late February than in mid-January. After all, back then it was a novelty that the two front-runners could trade victories in states almost designed to test different demographics. IA, NH, NV and SC were each gimme states for one of the two, which is why Super Tuesday ended up with no real momentum for either side.
But the calender favors Obama at this point. And if he doesn't screw it up, or Hillary doesn't pull a major upset and take Washington or Louisiana, many undecided or even soft Hillary supporters will say: "You know what. I've had enough of this. I can accept an Obama nomination." Poll numbers may start to swing heavily to Obama by the end of the month - unless, again, he screws up the debates. Superdelegates will come off the fence and look for closure to this thing. OH and TX will do for Hillary what Florida did for Rudy.
Sentiment in the blogosophere does not represent sentiment in the overall Democratic electorate. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have sizable bases of support that will never concede until the counting is all done. And much of that sentiment never comes through on the internet (and much of it does). But I think a sentiment that is rising among Democrats nationwide - and one that nobody has yet discussed - is frustration that this thing is going on and on. It's unfortunate for Clinton that the calender sets up this way for her, but that's why she had to do so much better than win the big states on Super Tuesday. Now she has to pull off some big upsets the next couple of weeks or face calls from masses of Democrats to step aside and start planning for the general election.
Call it primary fatigue but I think we can all sense it even here online with the fundraising wars, vitriolic flame wars between Obama supporters on Daily Kos and Hillary supporters on MyDD and Talkleft, and the often self-mocking references to ever more meta-analysis. We are political junkies and even we are getting exhausted from this process. Think about the rest of the Democratic Party.