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Ross, responding to Jay Cost's argument that the primary has been good for Democrats, says:
[W]hile the competition has been helpful for the Democrats, the chronology - and the narrative the chronology creates - hasn't been helpful at all. If you're going to have an evenly-matched, hard-fought primary, you want it to stay evenly-matched throughout, with the eventual winner only pulling away at the very end. Or better still, you want the eventual loser to dominate the early going, and the eventual winner to gradually claw their way back into things and then pull ahead at the end, creating a great "comeback kid" narrative to carry into the general election. What you don't want is what the Democrats have now: A dynamic in which the eventual winner - Obama, that is - pulled way ahead in the middle of the campaign, only to have the eventual loser mount a furious comeback that everyone outside her inner circle (and lots of people inside, one imagines) knows is more or less hopeless, but which has succeeded in bloodying the front-runner at precisely the moment when he could be gearing up to use his enormous financial edge to crush John McCain.Agreed. I've yet to hear a plausible scenario in which Clinton wins the superdelegates. Just about every serious path to the presidency requires Obama to utterly implode, to be rendered non-competitive for the nomination. In that scenario, the fact that Clinton remained in the race might make her a likelier nominee than Gore, but it militates towards a campaign that raises her positives and retains her acceptability to the majority of the party. In mounting a furious -- but basically hopeless -- campaign, however, Clinton is exposing Obama's weaknesses, but not gaining any real advantage from them. McCain's folks, by contrast, might have previously suspected that they should target white, economically depressed states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, but now they have a precinct-by-precinct map of where Pbama underperforms, ready narratives to activate in their negative campaigning (they don't have to grope around to create a line of attack), and a media thats now convinced of his vulnerabilities. It's possible that some of this toughened Obama up and prepared him for the Fall's attacks, but in the aggregate, it sure doesn't look healthy.
