Poblano over at 538.com has been uncanny in his predictions so far, and is starting to get larger coverage on teh intertubes.

so, it was with baited breath that i awaited his OR projection, considering the latest 2 polls.

basically, it's projected district by district and he has BHO winning by 13 pts, gaining 6 delegates.

He thinks that CLinton's rightward tilt (to appeal to the conservative later primaries) will hurt her here, in one of the US's most liberal states.  

Yesterday a WSJ/NBC poll came out showing that hillary clinton's postives have reached a 7-year low.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2 008/03/26/821438.aspx

Hillary Clinton is sporting the lowest personal ratings of the campaign. Moreover, her 37 percent positive rating is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.

Not good news for someone trying to win nationwide election.

However, another paragraph further on made many HRC-supporters throw the whole results out:

In addition, we oversampled African-Americans in order to get a more reliable cross-tab on many of the questions we asked in this poll regarding Sen. Barack Obama's speech on race and overall response to last week's Rev. Jeremiah Wright dustup.

The argument was that since AAs were oversampled, this poll meant nothing.  Today, NBC has some clarification:

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2 008/03/27/827746.aspx

Thus, African Americans are NOT over-represented in our national sample.

In addition to this national cross section, we interviewed an extra 100 African Americans to analyze the opinions of this group with a greater degree of statistical reliability. We combined these 100 only with the 77 African Americans that naturally fell into our national sample, for a total of 177 interviews with African Americans; these extra interviews were not combined with the full national sample of 700.

And so, there WAS no oversample ~ and thus HRC really DOES have a positive rating of only 37%.  

What's more, here's another tidbit that was missed in the initial hub-bub about the poll:

Because among Obama voters, Clinton has a net-negative personal rating (35-43) while Clinton voters have a net-positive view of Obama (50-29). Taken together, this appears to be evidence that Obama, intially, should have the easier time uniting the party than Clinton.

Failure to Close?

You want to talk about failing to close?  

Senator Clinton has gone from shoe-in to being pressured to drop if SHE doesn't take OH and TX!  Perhaps rather than pointing to these next two elections, we should all take a look at the past two MONTHS of elections.

THEN, let's ask: Who exactly are the voters having second thoughts about?  The man who is all speeches and no solutions, or the "inevitable" Senator from New York??

follow me down . . .

So, having seen this on OpenLeft, i thought i would plagiarize the idea one step further, and put out a nice transcript of the epic encounter between King Obama, his sidekick, Axelrod, and the Blue Knight!

So, a comment in a previous diary was reflecting on the philosophical basis of the Democratic party.  The exact quote was something like: "The Republicans have Christian morality and fiscal conservatism as their base.  What is the democrats' base?" or something like that.  [If whomever it was knows where that comment is, please lmk and i'll post it.]

This question has stuck in my craw.  

On a superficial level, i reject the fundamentalism of the Christian right, and I believe that the rich, and especially corporations, need to kick in more bucks than the poor and middle class.  But that is a negative identity.  What is a positive one?

Follow me below for my meditations on the subject if you'd like . . .

This is an honest question, not an attempt to flame the site.  I tried to search, but failed to find any sort of methodology post.  Lots of stuff with actual counts, but none explaining this site's "widget" counts on the right sidebars.    

Below a look at the numbers ~

Their anger and hate is driven by their fear, fear of what the end of their culture means.  They see that the end is all-too-near and are clinging desperately to their increasingly meaningless ideology.  They decry the end of morality and the decline of our society, and, truly, to them, the end of their culture seems to be the end of the world.  (Notice the rising popularity of `Revelationists' who believe that we are living in the Biblical `end of days.')  They are facing cultural extinction and are fighting for their lives.  Thus, we have the Culture War.  They believe whole-heartedly in their culture and would rather die than see it destroyed.  Thus, the Republicans are an organized front, an army, and are ready to fight until the bitter end.  

We, on the other hand, are culture-less, lost.  We have no faith in the old ways any longer, those represented by the GOP, but we've yet to find ourselves new ways.  We do not yet have an ideology to belong to instead of this evil, destructive one.  

Though it is our duty to resist their last attempts to keep control of the world or destroy it trying, we are scattered and disorganized.  Millions, perhaps billions, know deep in their hearts and minds that something is just not right and that we, as a society, can not go on in the same manner as we always have.  Unfortunately, most don't even begin to trace their vague unease back to its true source.  

Therefore, one purpose of this essay is to bring these scattered fragments into a true opposition movement by naming their vague feelings.  However, we can not defeat them through violence--we can only win by changing hearts, minds and souls.  We must not hate our opponent.  They are the victims of this culture, as much as we are.  We must take pity on them, and act towards them with love and kindness.  The revolution must be non-violent, and it must begin by education.  That is the true path to change and that is the second purpose of this. more below...