Obama really stomped Hillary yesterday, winning Maryland by 23, Virginia by 29 and DC by 51 points in what Tom Schaller has aptly termed "the Potomac Pummeling." And if the numbers are impressive, the demographics Obama won are more significant. He won whites, seniors, the poor, and even those in rural areas. In Virginia, he won Hispanics by eight points (though he lost among them in Maryland). And yes, Hillary Clinton "didn't campaign there." At least not much. But let's not be naive about this. Virginia and Maryland both border DC. Large swaths of them share our media market. And both of them are in the United States of America. No one forgot that Clinton was running, and neither of these states were insufficiently exposed to her campaign. Realizing she was going to lose, she skipped all three, but there's no chicken-or-egg question here. She didn't campaign because she wasn't going to win, it's not that she didn't win because she forgot to campaign. Meanwhile, Obama has been using this string of victories to begin acting more like the presumptive nominee -- a function of the campaign's calculation that, as manager David Plouffe said, “it’s next to impossible for Senator Clinton to close the delegate count.” And as part of this shift to a frontrunner campaign, Obama has been taking on McCain more directly:
Effective? Not?
