Oh God.

How rude!

LOL

Holy crap-ola.

Now, the ONLY vote that matters in the Democratic party is the Appalachian vote?

Straws are getting thinner and harder to grasp.

it is interesting how Obama can lose in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, while at the same time his supporters tout his "wide-appeal"

Likewise, Hillary's loss in North Carolina suggests that her appeal is limited also.

They are both great primary candidates, but maybe not graet general election candidates.  

It is counterintuitive that the states could differ so widely over Obama versus Hillary.  But there ya'; go. Another Dukakis is born.

He still won KS by a massive margin while winning Louisiana and keeping WA within a few points.

Nobody cared though

It's over - she cannot catch him in the delegate count.  And I don't think that the s-d's are going to be swayed by an area of the country which is the least representative of diversity.

that is what Nobama is afraid of.

Why is anyone donating to the Clinton campaign?

Why not just send Mark Penn, a big reason why she lost, a check directly?

All these diaries have a "then a miracle occurs..." moment in them.

Yep, she'll slaughter him in WV, slightly less so in KY.

And? And? Then what?

It doesn't give her the delegate edge.
It doesn't give her the popular edge.
It doesn't really give her squat.

Unlike the media, the supers are not going to be swayed by Clinton performing up to expectations in WV.

So what's the path to the nomination, other than saying to the supers "but we really, really want it!"?

I'm sorry, but I just don't see it, and haven't since she lost WI.

It's not enough for Clinton to simply reinforce what we already know about her coalition, she must appeal outside of it. Absent a collapse in Barack Obama's base he will be the nominee because he is the candidate ahead and their coalitions are roughly the same size.

WV and KY would be important, perhaps even crucial, if Clinton had some chance of overtaking Obama in the delegate race.  Since she doesn't, they'll be footnotes.  Clinton lost the delegate race in February, and her whole campaign since then has turned on two unlikely possibilities: support for Obama might simply collapse; she might be able to convince superdelegates that Obama is demonstrably unelectable.

What happened in NC and IN a few days ago was crucial, essentially, because it settled the first question--support for Obama is not going to collapse.  And nothing which happens in WV or KY will make the case that Obama is demonstrably unelectable (this isn't about "who is the better candidate" at this point, Clinton has to prove that he's actually unfit, which few reasonable people believe right now).

A few more points.  Clinton supporters would never, in a million years, accept an outcome where she arrived at the convention with a majority of pledged delegates and then had the nomination thrown to Obama by superdelegates.  The "I won't vote for X in the general" numbers for Obama are higher, obviously, because his supporters are now pretty certain he's going to be the nominee and are standing down.  If it looked likely that Clinton would prevail upon superdelegates to flip the nomination, I can promise you, these numbers would shoot straight up.

Second, a lot of the blame for the nasty tone of this election does rest with those who came up with the system for superdelegates.  They've created a perverse incentive for also-rans to go all out in an attempt to destroy the front runner (and if Clinton were ahead right now, Obama would face a similar choice about whether to go nuclear on things like the trust issue, the various scandals of the Clinton years, and so on).  The Dems could fix this with a simple rule change: suuperdelegates should be bound to vote for the winner of pledged delegates unless they voted in caucus before the convention by a margin of, say, 2/3rds, to release all delegates from their pledges.  We're talking about future contests, of course, but the current system should not survive.

Third, the outcome of the general election might depend upon the ability of Democratic voters to rediscover that this primary season has been a contest between "good" and "better" (and I mean that in its most subjective way--that's the view most supporters of each candidate had when this contest got started).

What do you make about the head-to-head polls which have consistently shown Clinton weak in the upper Midwest, btw?  Appalachia is Clinton's fortress, but all arguments about electability at this point, clearly, are based upon cherry-picking (it's not as though Clinton doesn't have her weaknesses, there isn't a single poll which shows that she's the stronger candidate against McCain by a large margin, and none which suggests that Obama can't win, which Clinton, to her credit, recognized during the last debate).

Those meaningless points at the end of the game when the outcome is clear.

How ironic, since it was the Clinton campaign that blathered endlessly about how states like those "don't matter".

It's all over but the shouting.

the obamabots and pundits will not be satisfied until the supreme court rules that this race is over regardless of the popular vote count and rules in favor of the messiah and therefore allowing the second coming to finally happen. this will be seen as fair and within the rules of the law and nominating process. the majority of the people who voted for the other candidate are just sour grapes and are just doing the country and party harm for not coming together.

lesson learned is that if we want to effect the nominating process, move to places like casper wyoming and caucus. then get your u-haul back to penn, ohio, and the likes of jersey and florida for the general when your vote will count.