Okay, I just want to vent about a little pet peeve of mine that appeared in the FP story. What does it really mean when Clinton supporters, along with the "pro-Obama media" say things like

But around the same time that Clinton started shining, Obama started faltering, and I don't think he's fully recovered from it yet.

??

In the last two months of the primaries, the Appalachian states came up big for Hillary, and they faught to a virtual draw in Texas. In those Appalachian primaries Hillary scored two huge victories (Kentucky, West Virgina), two states with demographics that favored her heavily. We saw this Appalachian trend early on when Clinton carried Tennessee, and when she dominated the western counties in Virginia and the northern counties in Maryland. For whatever reason, voters in Appalachia identified with her message. And there were many who knew this all along. Remember how everybody said she just had to score big in Texas and Ohio because Appalachia was going to pull through for her?

But it's not as though she took the rest of the Appalachian states as decisively as KY and WV. She won Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana each by less than 10 points. Solid, but unless you are just counting "wins" these were not the kind of clobberings that many expected.

Outside of Appalachia, how did Obama do? He won Oregon, North Carolina, and Montana by a margin of 55 delegates, more than Hillary's delegate margins from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, South Dakota, West Virginia, and the Texas primary combined (with 9 more to spare).

So to say Obama faltered is not exactly true and is borderline disingenuous. Did he come up short of the media's expectations? Certainly. But he most certainly beat the expectations of many Hillary supporters, who declared repeatedly (do I need to link all the diaries?) that Obama was finished and that with her momentum from Ohio and Texas she had turned the tide and would pull even. And in fact the more Obama actually exceded expectations the more we saw the "popular vote" meme foisted upon the media.

But that's not my point.

My point is, Obama was not running against a patsy. Obama was running against one of the greatest fundraisers the party has ever seen (second only to himself). He was running against a candidate who had been a household name for 16 years and who, at least in the democratic party, was considered very favorably. He was running against a senator from the country's second most populous state and who had a huge core of devoted followers. If it were not for Obama, Hillary Clinton would have easily run away with this primary and would likely be our next president.

To suggest that Obama "faltered" is to suggest that Obama should have dominated in every demographic and that he was running against a second-rate candidate who, due to his own shortcomings rather than the strength of his opposition, he couldn't put away. That is simply not the case, and to promote this thinking is to suggest that the once-formidable Hillary Clinton was really not very formidable at all.

There is one thing Hillary could say that would remove all need for nuance in her campaign communications. If she could say this, she could say practically anything she wanted about Barrack Obama and she would be allowed such frankness simply out of respect. She could say virtually anything about her policy ideals and we would be given to respect them almost unconditionally. The Tuzla affair would have been a fleeting blip, merely a forgivably goofy gaffe, and we might even be tempted to praise her association with Rupert Murdoch. At this point in the democratic campaign we would all be looking forward to a Denver convention where there would be no talk of unity because, pretty much from the start, the party would already have unified around its candidate, and there would have been no Clinton-Obama divisions in the first place. In fact, Hillary Clinton could have ended this campaign in Iowa.

If she could only say what she now wishes she had said in Iowa and in each state throughout the campaign. If she had only said this:

"I just want to thank all of you who stood with me and others in our party in opposition to our president's misguided, short-sighted, and politically expedient campaign to create conflict in this world where no conflict was necessary. The minority of senators who actually took the time to investigate the National Intelligence Estimate were convinced that there were serious flaws in the administration's rationale, and given that the president has in most other ways shown himself to be untrustworthy, we simply felt that there was no way we could give the president our approval until those flaws were publicly addressed and answered to. Of course, as you will remember, there was great political pressure to give the president our approval and the benefit of the doubt. The president's approval ratings were at an all-time high, and the 24 of us who voted "no" in the senate did so despite polls that showed over 80% of the American public was against us at the time. But we felt that this vote was a matter too important to trade for cheap political gain, and in our hearts, and I know in my conscience, the moral choice was crystal clear. I voted NO to the Authorization for Use of Military Force because of my commitment to world peace and to the prescious lives of those who defend our liberties. And because of this commitment which I made public on October 10, 2002, you know that I can be trusted, more than any candidate remaining in this race, to bring our troops home in a timely manner, to provide our veteran service men and women with the best possible medical care, and to restore peace in the Middle East."

Well, I guess that about covers it, doesn't it? I'm convinced if she would have said this back in January we'd all be talking about Obama's chances in 2016, or whether he or Edwards or Richardson (probably Richardson) would make the best VP choice. But, like a lot of us have already discovered in our own personal endeavors, life can be cruel sometimes.