I feel like one of the Professor's students who hasn't heeded his lectures on Barack's virtues and the need to play fair,,and I also think that Barack is brilliant, a great speaker etc. However, Hillary has won the big states like NY, CA, PA, OH, FL etc that are essential to winning the big election, and her appeal to a broad cross-section of voters is pretty compelling. In all fairness to Democratic delegates from Wyoming or Mississippi or South Carolina, they can't deliver their states in November and they are going to the convention mainly to have a good time. Hillary has the momentum and wins the most populous states and those who play a strict numbers game without nuance are making a huge mistake.

YEah, there's a good strategy -- take all of the problems we have now with media consolidation, the banking crisis and pricy pharmaceutical problems and blame them not on George W. Bush but on the last Democratic president.

I think John McCain is spoofing Jonathan Taplin's account.

Obama isn't not giving this speech because he's a nice guy. He's not giving this speech because it's bad for our side and he's smart enough to know it.

I like the speech except for conflating Afghanistan and Iraq. The majority of American people rightly see stabilizing Afghanistan as a valid mission. So does Obama. It's not an easy task but it'll be doable with a better president, better diplomacy, and withdrawing from Iraq.

Destor please go read some history from the 1990s.

I still don't see how she took Florida. I live in Florida and the majority of people I speak with all voted for either Obama or Edwards.

In discussing the Democratic Party primary, I think we need to keep ever foremost in mind one key fact: namely, that the system of proportional delegate selection in that party deliberately makes individual state "wins" or "losses" important but not determinative in themselves. It takes many states to cumulatively determine the the Democratic Party's ultimate nominee -- by design. The candidate who understands this and who focuses on gaining the highest delegate total will -- as with the electoral college in the general election -- win all the marbles, not just some of them.

After the recent Pennsylvania primary, as predicted, Senator You-Know-Her's 10% margin of victory in this "big state" netted her campaign somewhere between 14 and 16 delegates at the expense of Senator Obama's 140-some-odd delegate lead. Again, and by design of the Democratic Party primary rules that all candidates accepted at the outset of this long process, that individual movement, one way or another, cannot by itself determine much. The same goes for the few other state primaries and caucuses remaining in this primary campaign season.

From every rational projection of electoral reality that I've read, Barack Obama's significant lead in North Carolina, just to take a single state example, will probably net him somewhere around 20 delegates at the expense of You-Know-Her's campaign -- which puts her Quixotic quest right back where it languished before the "big state" primary windmill in Pennsylvania. Ever fewer and smaller state primaries remain after May 6 (Indiana and North Carolina) with ever fewer numbers of delegates at stake for either of the two Democratic Party presidential candidates. At the end of the day, so to speak, Senator Obama will win the Democratic Party nomination because he will have won the greatest number of delegates chosen by the American voters in all the states that held primaries and/or caucuses according to agreed-upon party rules. Just the facts, ma'am. Just the facts.

As for the so-called "superdelegates" who supposedly have the best long-term interests of the party at stake, the party-building-and-expanding strategy of Senator Obama will probably weigh large in their considerations. Frankly -- and I say this as a sixty-year-old white man myself -- the young and other newly-registered Democrats of today will form the party of tomorrow. We declining geezers still matter, but many of us will not live to see President Obama's Democratic Party successor take up the torch that he will pass along eight years from now. And again, frankly, if America ever hopes to regain its status as a modern, first-rate country, the more technically skilled and better educated among the secular population (hopefully a higher number tomorrow than today) had better have a lot more to say about what happens next than those huddled masses of animists praying fervently for an apocalyptic Rupture to just "take them away" from it all. That always-promised trick hasn't worked through millennia of human history.

The Democrcats need to leave appealing to sub-educated fear and loathing to the fascist Republicans. They have nothing else but Fear Itself to offer. To the great extent that Senator You-Know-Her has chosen to emulate, if not personify, the "vast right wing conspiracy" that she has apparently joined herself, then she will have perhaps another insignificant "win" or two ahead of her in the next month, but the smaller and smaller number of delegates that she may add to her column simply don't -- and can't -- add up to enough. And what she will have paid only to lose as much as she has given away, will make all her calculations anything but a bargain: to herself, her party, and the country.

Jonathan Taplin,
FYI, 1980-2000 was the best period in the history of US, best period in the history of humankind. People were never were more prosperous, more free that in that time.
Even if I extent that to from 1980 to 2008, this statement still will be tru.
So, why do you cling to your bitterness, your hate of Clinton, your dogmatic leftist ideology?

Senator Obama has already "closed the deal" with enough people. He doesn't have to close the deal with everyone. No political candidate ever does that. Still, it never pays to claim victory too early (see infamous, childish aircraft-carrier "mission accomplished" stunts for edifying examples). Real victory will come when it comes in another month or so. It therefore pays for Senator Obama to remain cool, avoid You-Know-Her-type raving, lunatic threats to "obliterate" entire nations of people for not attacking America, and just have a little more patient confidence in a sound long-term strategy well executed and managed.

Almost no states with Pennsylvania-like demographics remain on the campaign schedule, so the most-disadvantageous period -- from Senator Obama's point of view -- remains behind now and not ahead. Unfortunately for You-Know-Her, the complete opposite has become true for her. And whatever claims she makes that what he has won doesn't make Senator Obama the winner, the same and worse holds for her since she has won even less. The Democratic Party nominating "deal" will close after the last primary or caucus in another six weeks or so. Senator Obama can then claim that he has closed the deal once and for all when that happens.

Senator You-Know-Her, of course, will just look for another goalpost to move or agreed-upon rule to renege on, shouting "deal? what deal? We haven't even begun to talk about making deals yet!" And so on and so forth up until -- and throughout -- President Obama's swearing in and first inaugural address.

Again, Senator Obama has already won, but doesn't want to come out and prematurely claim so himself. Legions of others, including Slate.com with their "Hillary Death Watch" feature and widget "delegate counter" have done all the mathematical projections for him. Senator Obama can turn the "close the deal" meme to his advantage, though, by just repeating that when all the primaries and caucuses have taken place, that he fully intends to have the largest number of delegates and that fact will demonstrate conclusively -- since all good things must come to an end -- that the contest has concluded and he has won.

As for all the "damage" that a long campaign supposedly does to the Democrats, the public has a notoriously short memory and the Democrats have more than enough time to highlight John McCain's humiliating Bush-butt-kissing, endless-war-agitating and goofy "Voodoo Economics." Et cetera, et cetera. The summer vacation months typically result in national political narcolepsy and the actual general election campaign really begins in September. The Democrats, led by nominee Barack Obama, have more than all the time they need to dispense with an aging human malaprop like John "senior moment" McBomb and his thoroughly discredited Brand "R," for recrudescent reactionary repulsiveness.