Will Hope Spring?

PA Update: I missed this, but Teresa Heinz Kerry wrote an oped in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette Sunday endorsing Obama. I figure the paper itself will endorse him, too.


Meet the Press Sunday tried to keep the Dem race alive, despite GOPer Peggy Noonan claiming that Hillary is "surrounded by people who would adore the chance to be for Obama." Then on another show, a New York Magazine reporter claimed that top Clinton staff told Hillary they won't stick with her if she tries to destroy Obama. Both quotes are here; I happened to see the MTP gabfest replay switching during commercials and halftime on NCAA basketball, and when I wasn't running the vacuum cleaner--and Noonan's comment was quite strange in the context of keeping up the contest talk.

Oddly, I didn't hear them mention Hillary's money problems (unless they did so during the Memphis-Mississippi State action.) Or the tidbit I saw somewhere--that after reaching 1 million donors just last month, the Obama campaign is quietly coming close to 2 million donors.

But what was interesting in terms of that part of the CW that still thinks there is a nomination question is that they weren't talking about Pennsylvania as being decisive, unless Obama wins it. They were looking to North Carolina and Indiana the following week. Once again, Hillary has to win both or it's over, was pretty much the consensus. So now the idea is it could be over in May.

I also saw somewhere that PA Gov Rendell is claiming that in the general, Obama as well as Clinton would win the Commonwealth. He's got Obama to thank already for a lot of new Democrats. Final figures will be out shortly after the registration deadline today (Monday), but already Dems have added at least 100,000 while the GOP has lost 14,000.

But PA is still going to be the political focus, and though the Obama campaign has succeeded in changing expectations, and Obama has been campaigning elsewhere, there seem to be plans for Obama to contest it actively. Obama told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he's planning an Iowa-style campaign: meeting with small groups and talking to people across the state, over the weeks to come.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post hit a couple of VFWs in Harrisburg, one white and one black, and found that racial division is real. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy on several levels, and not all that enlightening. (Although one white guy who won't vote for Obama did give him credit for being loyal to Rev. Wright, so my intuition on that much at least was justified.)

Noting the ugly round number of 4,000 U. S. soldier deaths in Iraq, I blogged over at Dreaming Up Daily about an article called Euphemism and American Violence--the uses of euphemism to mask the lies and realities that allow such wars to start and go on this way. This war and much else of what this government does is so clearly designed to benefit certain corporations and wealthy people that corporate conspiracy theories are usually beside the point. But a diary I just saw at Kos makes a very good point about how media corporations--the corporations virtually in charge of politics, and certainly the major beneficiares of political campaigns--are deciding the issues that the presidency will be decided on. And, this diarist maintains, they're making sure it's anything but controlling corporate power.