Fifty50 in-depth analysis: Pennsylvania Democratic Primary

*
You've heard the liars and BS craftsmen spinning their primary analysis to the craven official media. Everybody wants to tell you what it all means. Well, allowing for the fact that I have my own biases, I think a few basic facts are hard to dispute. And the meaning is self-evident to us rubes in Champaign, Illinois, if not the bitter imbeciles of central Pennsylvania and the Beltway Cocktail Circuit.

First, look at these Pollster.com charts. I'm not good at this stuff, and these are probably not the best charts to use, but they look good enough to show that Obama has been steadily been closing the gap on Clinton's lead since the beginning of 2007 or the beginning of 2008 --- take your pick. As far as I can tell, that fact has not been widely reported, or reported as being significant. You may remember that a similar failure of communication led to stories about how Obama got trounced in the New Hampshire primary, even though he steadily gained on Clinton up until primary day. (Obama got "trounced" because he did not live up to the hype or inaccurate opinion polling after the Iowa caucuses.)

Second, there is some irritating and disingenuous "conventional wisdom" being dispensed about how the Democrats are doing themselves tremendous harm through self-destructive negative campaigning tactics. Well, no, that's not really true: Hillary Clinton and her peckerwood husband, and their surrogates, have been directly appealing to the bigot vote by invoking the names of Scary Negroes and their purported association with Obama. Then there's her disingenuous shot-and-beer pandering to morons who think Chablis and Merlot are not manly, and her ridiculous purported love affair with guns. And she has been aided in her tactics by the official media, especially Gibson and "George" on the ABC debate. As far as I can tell, Obama has retaliated by referring to Hillary as "Annie Oakley."

To summarize, both a casual and a careful reader of the news would be justified in concluding that after months of throwing the kitchen sink, all the rolling pins in the drawers, and a bushel of bigoted personal attacks at her opponent, Hillary Clinton was not able to stop the slow and steady gains made by Obama in Pennsylvania over the past year or two.

Update while I'm still writing the original post: now The New Republic is comparing Obama to McGovern, meaning that he is a Don Quixote figure with an increasingly isolated band of fanatics as his only support. Expect to hear a lot of this "meme" in the next two weeks and beyond. Obama will be portrayed as the Democrat who is tearing the party apart.