Long long ago, in the before time, I read a couple of good articles about Hillary's popularity ceiling. The gist of them being that in order to win she had to keep the favorables of any rival below 40% because there was nothing in the polling or demographics that pointed to her ever going over 50% popularity. Even if she won the primary, any general election win was going to come in the 47-49% range. I completely forgot about that until just now. Thanks for the memory jog. It feels like two lifetimes ago.

Yep, those nationwide polls are the metric alright. Especially that final nationwide poll on Election Day.

Just ask Gore how happy he was to win the that final nationwide poll.

Gore won that election, but was prevented from claiming the office by judicial fiat. The poll was right.

Nope, Ed. Gore won the popular vote of that election. By 3 Million votes. That mattered about as much as a national poll matters.

In the USA, the Electoral College elects the President. Bush beat Gore. Also, Gore lost the Florida vote, by everybody's analysis. The SC decision forced Florida to stop counting after the 4th or 5th recount. Gore never had the votes, and ran out of time to manufacture more votes.

Back to the topic, Hillary had a reasonable argument that she could have won the bigger states, thus winning the EC. But we will never know now how she would have done.

Interesting that Hillary could never reach out beyond her core constituency. Glass ceiling, or her determination to run a general election campaign and refuse to accede to grass roots' abhorrence of candidates who refused to repudiate the war? I guess we'll never know.

But we can say that Hillary's inability to reach beyond her core would have boded poorly for the general election. Her strategy was to go for the small, disputed "center" in a few battleground states. Bush "won" by motivating conservaties, not centrists, to vote in those states. Given Hillary's high negatives, she could have been the motivation this time around. And it's not clear how many voters she could have added to her 45% of Democrats. Her New Democratic strategy of stiffing the grass roots (who else they gonna vote for?) was not particularly inspirational to those who have faced the choice of voting for the lesser of two evils for most of our lives.

The fact that Appalachian territories voted late in the cycle did not mean that Clinton had a late surge, but it was portrayed that way. MKD is right that there were many published pieces predicting that Clinton would not get past a set ceiling of support, given her high name recognition and high negatives. Those predictions appear to have been right, but I haven't seen anyone claiming credit for their brilliance. Maybe the pre-primary period seems so long ago that they've forgotten they even predicted it.

It's been suggested that the working class rural areas that Clinton polled so strongly with will likely go with the Republican candidate anyway. I.e., she was fighting for first place in areas where she had little chance of winning in the general election anyway.

Unfortunately, both Obama and Hillary showed their mutual inherent impotence last week in their genuflections before the American-Likud-Kadima Political Action Committee by announcing their willingness to continue human rights abuses in the Palestine territories and wage war on Iran.

Obama was running in 2006 in 2003. He's running in 2011 now.

This horse-race stuff leaves me sort of cold, I suppose, and am I the only one who notices that the horse-race rigamarole was precisely what Hillary Clinton was flogging as a way to promote her candidacy?

I'm way more interested now in the way that Barack Obama is kicking off his general election campaign by going to Virginia and North Carolina. If we can't convince the South to secede again :-) let's at least have a Democratic Party that doesn't simply concede these states to the GOP. 50 state strategy...yes!

A substantial amount of what other writers have called "Hillary's negatives" date to the verbal war which has raged against her since she and her husband became nationally known. The fact is, although she has been accused of all manner of horrible things, she has never been found guilty of any of them. Remember, if you didn't hear it on right-wing talk radio, she was accused of ordering the murder of Vince Foster! Despite repeated FBI assurances that there is no question that Foster committed suicide. When someone is repeatedly accused of such horrible acts, even when truth is utterly lacking or the "facts" have been twisted beyond recognition, the vast majority of people will believe that "where there's smoke, there's fire." I vividly remember the criticisms of her as a professional woman, as an intelligent woman, in the 1992 campaign. I vividly remember that she was never allowed to just be who she is. Instead a highly negative persona was created about her by the people who most opposed her husband. The viciousness of these attacks has been almost unfathomable to anyone who really looks at the evidence. And that vicious attack-dog attitude now poisons even the darlings of the "progressive establishment" -- people like Keith Olberman, who clearly hate her, but without even once having stated a good reason. They have twisted what she said, twisted how she said it, used truly underhanded editing techniques to make her appear what she is not -- no wonder she has high negatives! The Pope would have high negatives with that kind of coverage, even if he supported birth control! People who meet Mrs. Clinton are always surprised by how personable, warm and engaging she is. They all come away saying "THIS is Hillary Clinton!?!?" So, this is what I think: We have finally found the answer to the stupidest discrimination question of all time -- "If you want to succeed in this society, is it better to be a black man or a white woman?" Guess what the answer is? In fact, given Obama's lack of experience and lack of recognizable policies, if Hillary Clinton had been a man, she would now be the nominee. In fact, if one takes the rantings of all those anti-Clinton commentators and substitutes racist invective terms for the sexists invective directed against her, the viciousness of the attacks would be apparent to everyone. Somehow, it is okay to publiclay blast a competent, educated, intelligent woman with the worst kind of bigoted invective in the national media, but it's not okay to do the same to a black man. The media coverage of Mr. Obama has been worshipful to the point of fawning. If Mr. Obama cares at all about the votes of women and the well-being of women (something I'm not sure of, because he's been so markedly silent on the sexist attacks directed toward Mrs. Clinton) he will have to make another speech about prejudice and bigotry -- not the "race speech" this time, but the "sexism speech," about the most lingering, most difficult of all bigotries, the bigotry directed at women who dare to think they can build their own independent lives, have professional careers, and actually make a contribution in those professional careers. Many, many millions of women have struggled in their own lives against the vicious sexism that has been publicly directed at Mrs. Clinton both during this campaign and for the past 17 years. After forty years in the sexist trenches, I can say unequivocally that the most resistant prejudice is the one directed against women. When a black woman runs for president and no one accuses her of being a bitch (without citing any real evidence), then I'll believe that there is no more sexism. Not until.

Pardon the tangential-to-the-thread reply to Larry who maintains that although Gore won the national poll and the popular vote in Florida, it did not matter because "Gore lost the Florida [electoral college] vote, by everybody's analysis."

In the interest of historical accuracy, I refer to Wikipedia article Florida election recount:

On Nov. 8 the count gave Bush a margin of victory narrow enough to trigger an automatic recount that reduced his margin to a few hundred votes. Gore then requested a recount in only 4 counties, an aguably feeble response. On Nov. 18 Florida SOS Harris certified Bush the winner with the latest recount unfinished. On Dec. 8 the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount.

It was then that the U. S. Supreme Court intervened, which resulted in the laughable excuse for jurisprudence known as "Bush v. Gore". Justice Stevens' dissent in that decision concluded as follows:

"Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

According to the Florida Ballot Project, a review of uncounted ballots performed by the National Opinion Research Center, a review of all ballots statewide (however run) showed Gore as the winner of the election.

Gore had the votes, but the U. S. Supreme Court forbid the recount ordered by the Florida Court which would have given Gore the win he actually tallied.

The fact is, although she has been accused of all manner of horrible things, she has never been found guilty of any of them.

Charge: She reneged on her oath to uphold the Constitution when she voted for the war on Iraq and became complicit in this crime against humanity. Guilty or not guilty?

Charge: She lied about being under sniper fire in Tuzla. Guilty or not guilty?

Charge: Incompetence in creating a national health care plan. Guilty or not guilty?

Oregon Warbler--good lord, we are now being called upon to do...what exactly? Denounce the screwball Vince Foster screeds from Pat Robertson?

I can see you're disappointed that Sen. Clinton is not the nominee, and that you hold a low opinion of Sen. Obama. At least that is clear.

"People who meet Mrs. Clinton are always surprised by how personable, warm and engaging she is. They all come away saying 'THIS is Hillary Clinton!?!?'" I wouldn't know, and even if it were true, what's the point? Nobody would have been obliged to vote for her if she had someone been certified as "personable, warm, and engaging."

"...given Obama's lack of experience and lack of recognizable policies...." The recognizable-policies claim is absurd. The experience claim is the same thing that Sen. Clinton kept hawking on the campaign trail, and we all know how that worked out.

"Somehow, it is okay to publicly blast a competent, educated, intelligent woman with the worst kind of bigoted invective in the national media, but it's not okay to do the same to a black man." No, actually the misogynist garbage was not OK.

"...if Hillary Clinton had been a man, she would now be the nominee." I'd say, if she had admitted error in her war-powers vote, we would now be discussing her general-election campaign. But she didn't, and we're not, and she's going to get to mull over that BIG mistake for the rest of her life, I expect.

Senator Clinton would of motivated the largely currently unmotivated republicans to cast votes against her instead of for their largely uninspiring candidate John Sidney McCain III. Obama they do not know how to deal with. Advantage Obama

C'mon, Obama was thwumped in most primaries after the press started doing its job (somewhat) by reporting what was behind the Obama cardboard cut-out. Had this been covered by January 1st Hillary would be the nominee. Obama benefited from the ill-advised front-loaded primary/caucus plan that didn't allow enough time (at first) to get a peek behind the cardboard cut-out.

Note that Obama did better when the alleged primary was a caucus, and not too well when it was an actual primary.

Bob Tiernan

Bob T. makes broad claims about the Democratic primaries which he cannot document.

Refer to the Wikipedia article Results of the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries. In the 'Local contests' section there is a table which shows side-by-side the percentages of the primary votes or first-level caucus delegates Senators Clinton and Obama received in each contest. I made a nice Excel chart from it that I can't share here. It shows no point beyond which Sen. Obama was beaten badly (much less "thwumped") in a majority of contests.

I defy him to show a time when "the press started doing its job". The corporatized press cannot perform real journalism.

<h2>A caucus is a legitimate forum for choosing delegates, although he alleges otherwise, again with no supporting data.</h2>