How did this get so un-fun so fast?

Somewhere between 8 and 11 points, Hillary Clinton will finally get her victory tonight. Big enough to make the superdelegates look at each other and pause and say “well, uh, I mean, we can’t send her packing on that,” but not big enough to be bigger than expected, or to give her anything like the kind of momentum she needs to have right now. If you don’t know how to interpret tonight, I suspect it’s because after seven weeks of waiting for an outcome, you really haven’t been given one.

It’s brutalizing to watch the best political team on television – which is like 50 people now – stumble around in search of a retrofitting of a narrative to tonight’s result. And make no mistake, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Perhaps, if it were a handful of actual journalists, there might be some honest presenting of the facts and insightful analysis of them. But CNN has allowed its coverage to devolve into a menagerie of surrogates that they try to keep in partisan balance. I’d switch if I though anyone else a) had better coverage, or b) had better graphics.

Reality check: is there anything that could happen, short of some sort of Spitzer/Mosley/chief-of-police-of-Tehran stunt, that would make Obama exit the race before the convention in August? Post a comment if you think the answer is yes, ‘cause the answer is no. Now put on your superdelegate hat and ask yourself, with the way this race has gone in the last few weeks, are you going to let that happen?

I maintain that the superdelegate dam is ready to break, for that reason if no other. What they are waiting for is a win – if he gives them a win in two weeks, I think they’ll end it. An endorsement by Gore or Edwards, or both, some time in the next two weeks, might lead that charge.

Watching Hillary’s victory speech moment ago, her supporters kept breaking out into a chant that was evidently supposed to be “Yes She Can!” but that ended up as a mumbled blend of “She” and “We,” an iteration of the phrase with which her supporters are no doubt more familiar. Then she tried to close her speech with an emphatic “Yes…We…Will!” but half the crowd shouted “Can!” at the end. That’s gotta be annoying for her. She’s still here, but it’s his campaign.


12:20 AM update: It's interesting that the punditry pegged "double digits" as the over/under for tonight, for a couple of reasons. One, the margin was looking like slightly under 10 points, so 10 looked like a good stretch goal for the candidate who had to meet a stretch goal to show progress. Two, it's very tempting to think that, if we had a base-8 or base-12 numeral system, this small piece of picking who will be our next president would have a different interpretive benchmark. Third, with 98% reporting, CNN reports 55% to 45%, but it looks like they're rounding - NYT has it 54.9% to 45.1%. The haughty laughter welling up inside me can barely be contained.

All three of these observations point to one thing clearly: I am surrounded by idiots. On the other hand, maybe perception is reality more than I'm giving it credit for here.