This pundit got it (half) right

Although I'm having difficulty finding a source that nails down the numbers conclusively for IN, I'm going to go ahead and call myself half right on yesterday's primary prognostications. It appears that Clinton has won IN by a narrow margin (51% to 49%). I was a bit short on my Obama guess however - he won by a wide margin of 15 points (57% to 42% - 1% actually didn't care. Seriously? In this race?) rather than the medium 5-10 margin I predicted.

So - do my other predictions still hold? I think they do. Without some sort of intervention of a biblical magnitude (locusts, anyone?) I don't think Clinton has a realistic chance of being able to continue her nomination bid past June 3rd and the end of primary season. MSN claims that she has once again been forced to loan the campaign money, more superdelegates are agitating for her to drop out of the race, and the math for both superdelegates and voters has become effectively impossible for her to win.

This all means that even those sunny-eyed optimists among us who thought Clinton could still pull the rabbit out of her hat should start looking toward a McCain v. Obama contest come November. Honestly, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if the Democrats wanted a good shot at losing this November, there's only one candidate they could have chosen that would have given them a better shot than Hillary Clinton - and that's Barack Obama. With Clinton out of the race, the Republican machine is going to start working overtime ferreting out the skeletons in Obama's closet that - between the Obama personality cult and the Hillary hating - no one's been looking for during the Democratic primary. That's not to suggest that I think Obama is a dishonest guy. It is to suggest that I think the vetting process is far from complete, and for a guy that many seem to think is this country's political Messiah, any small foibles are going to read as larger than life.

I think Obama's wife might turn out to be one of his biggest liabilities in a national campaign. While he seems to have spent his life trying very hard to rise above the stereotype of the angry black man, she seems to have spent the same amount of time attempting to cement her role as the angry black woman. I envision her making more statements in the future similar to her "this is the first time in 20 years that I've felt pride in my country" mess. And I don't envision that such statements will be of any help in endearing Obama to the large number of lower middle class and working class voters who are suspicious as hell of his "hope" rhetoric - a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

It should be interesting.