M-I-S-S-I...

S-S-I-P-P-I :-)

I have gotten a little behind on my political news lately. I think the coverage favored Obama when he was on his post-Super Tuesday roll (12 wins in a row!). Inevitably it shifted and turned more negative toward him, more positive for Clinton. I predict that in about two to three weeks we'll see another shift.

MSNBC did notice how interesting it is that the media have discounted Wyoming and Mississippi (where Obama was expected to win) but plays up the importance of Pennsylvania (where Clinton is expected to maintain her double digit lead in the polls). But there's little talk of North Carolina which has almost as many delegates as Pennsylvania and favors Obama.

And I found a link on The Daily Dish to a piece about how the popular vote tallies that the press reports don't include numbers from the Iowa, Nevada, Washington, and Maine caucuses. Those states don't report official popular vote numbers, but Obama won three of them. And if estimates reflecting his and Clinton's delegate wins in those caucus states are added to the popular vote statistics being reported, Obama had a lead of over 700,000 in the popular vote even before Mississippi voted today. (That's 700,000 out of approximately 26 million Democratic votes cast.)

So it's not only the delegate math that doesn't favor Hillary; overcoming her popular vote deficit doesn't appear likely either.

I have to admit to being dismayed by Obama's failure to win any of the really big states like California or Texas (though he won the delegate count there). It leaves the Clinton campaign with an argument that they can continue to wield.

BACK WHEN HILLARY HAD HER "MOMENT" at the end of the debate in Texas, I had the sense that the Democratic race would end on a up note, with both campaigns sticking to the high road. For the first time I looked at Hillary and could imagine her on the Democratic ticket.

But I also had this sense of foreboding, which I think I shared with Mom, that perhaps the "moment" was simply staged, and the Clinton campaign was preparing to pounce. In retrospect, that now seems to be the case, and the "moment" for me has become the moment when the race changed character. No matter who is the nominee now, the hope that so many people--on both sides--had felt about history in the making has been tainted by negative ads, negative characterizations, and just flat-out lies.

You could say that that was inevitable. Except that it wasn't. People do make choices. And with only two candidates left in the Democratic race, we now are finding ourselves more intimately acquainted with those choices than we may be comfortable with. I suspect that a lot of people who were excited about the political process for the first time may tune out. I'm even finding myself feeling the urge to do so.