From all sorts of little clues and signals, I get the feeling that the Clintons may be overestimating just how much power and influence they still have in the Democratic Party. One thing that;s not mentioned enough is that no matter how strong her effort to go negative on Obama, she is still viewed far more negatively than he is. That was true at the beginning of the camapign, it is even more so now. So how does that make her the preferable candidate? Plus he brings in lots of new voters and lots more $$$ to the party. The Clintons are history.

Well said.

And if people wonder if these calls really help, THEY DO.

I was on the phone yesterday talking to Indiana voters. One man told me he had been undecided until that morning.  He said he got a call from a Clinton supporter, but remained undecided. Then he heard from an Obama supporter, and that did it for him. When I called, I was his third call of the day, and he was happily in the Obama column.

If you like blogging, you really will like calling. I ask people if they are supporting Hillary Clinton what they like best about her, and that sometimes gives me an opening to talk about Obama's positions.

At least once a session, you'll get a jerk. One woman I called, when I said I was calling for Obama, said, "Oooh, let me put down my bible and gun." I fired back "did you know Obama has an excellent rating from the NRA?" Her response? "I'm part of Operation Chaos so I'm not going to be of any help to you."

After I related this call to others at the call center, one of them said to respond with this: "But if Operation Chaos succees and McCain loses, you'll be stuck with Clinton for the next eight years. Is that what you really want?" That caused at least one Op. Chaos member to change his mind and vote for Obama.

Make the calls. You'll meet kind people and rude people. You'll meet intelligent people and people who are woefully underinformed.

I talked to a woman yesterday who said we were right to go to war in Iraq because of 9/11. I said but they never attacked us! I talked to her for a few minutes to try to correct misperceptions, and I could hear her mind cracking open a bit as we talked.

Here, you make arguments, and you don't always know how they land. But on the phone, you get the feedback right away. Try it, please. Even if you, like me, are phone shy. I hate talking on the phone and rarely do it in my personal life. But for the cause, I'll bear any burden.

Join me! Go to www.barackobama.com and just click the big button that says "Make Calls." You'll be walked through everything. There's even audio of a sample call. It really makes a difference, and we're so close in Indiana...!

"If you look for the social economic motive, you will not have to wait for history to tell you what was propaganda and what was truth." - George Seldes

Regarding what's been going on within the Clinton campaign, Robert Parry at ConsortiumNews says that all the negative stuff thrown at Obama was part of Clinton's oppo research and in place last December. At:

http://consortiumnews.com/2008/050308.html

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Last December, when I first learned via Clinton insiders that their "oppo" package would include Barack Obama's associations with fiery black preacher Jeremiah Wright and Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers, I shrugged at what sounded to me like sub-standard fare from the dark side of American politics.

So what if someone's minister said some stupid things or that an aging one-time student radical had lent some support to a politician's campaign, I thought.

Besides those two themes, Clinton insiders were plotting how to exploit Obama's past political ties to indicted real-estate developer Tony Rezko, and they even were hashing over how they might slip in suggestions that Obama's dead mother had been a leftist. (When I heard the "oppo" about the dead mother, I really couldn't believe my ears.)

Even then - in December before the first votes had been cast - the Clintons were so caught up in their ambition to return to the White House that they were veering toward the worst aspects of politics, what is generally associated with the American Right and the most ruthless Republican operatives - guilt-by-association, red-baiting, McCarthyism and racial messaging.

The rationale that I heard from the Clinton operatives was that these Obama vulnerabilities would be exploited by the Republicans in the general election, so it was necessary to destroy Obama when there was still time for another Democrat (i.e. Hillary Clinton) to be nominated.

But part of me didn't believe the Clintons would go through with this War on Obama. I had trouble envisioning people who had been victimized by similar tactics - indeed whom I had defended when they were on the receiving end - resorting to such acts against a fellow Democrat, who by all accounts is a decent fellow and a good family man.

It is now clear, however, that the Clintons did decide to go through with it, "throwing the kitchen sink" at Obama, as one Clinton aide explained to the New York Times.

Plus, in doing so, the Clinton camp struck an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend alliance with some of the same pro-Republican media outlets that Sen. Clinton had dubbed in the 1990s the "vast right-wing conspiracy."

This alliance of convenience made Hillary Clinton an odd bedfellow with right-wing media mogul Richard Mellon Scaife, Fox News and even Rush Limbaugh, who has been urging Republicans to vote for Sen. Clinton in the Democratic primaries as a way to block Sen. Obama's nomination.

And, with the right-wing media onboard, the mainstream news commentators could be counted on to tag along - which many did.

But the Clintons also got special help from one of their old advisers, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, who reprised many of the anti-Obama "oppo" themes during a key prime-time debate before the Pennsylvania primary. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Are the Clintons Playing Joe McCarthy?']

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Go there and read it all.

So, let me see if I've got this straight.  If the Clintons damage the party beyond repair and John McCain wins the general, then that means it's all Obama's fault?

What part of "international war crimes" do you not understand?

You're so right that it hurts!
Now, lets look and the O mans' biggest problem at this time (and the Dems in general) It is the Effing Corporate Media. I just spent the morning swithching betweenthe networks corporate stooges and came away with ta few observations worth sharing.
 Hill and george- Not too bad. However something was missing!
 Obama and the proker- pigman couldn't lay a finger on him! However something was missing. The common thread.
 Wright vs Hagee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 george- zip!
 pigman-zip!
 The most obvious omission I have ever seen (and I am well over 60!) If the Dems don't come out swinging with respect to this horror, they don't deserve to win in Nov!

The idea that Hillary Clinton willwin by a blowout margin is outlandish.Not with revelations coming out day-in and day-out that the Clintons were responsible for the sale of the Magnequench Plant here in Anderson,IN and they were avid supporters of NAFTA.

Even if she manages to win the popular vote, she will not win the delegate count which is heavily weighted in favor of Indianapolis and the Lake Country area where Obama is the prohibitive favorite.

Obama is a nice guy who will graciously concede to the Clintons because, well you know, they deserve it. This fits in with their condescending attitude towards him and everyone who voted and supported him right from the very beginning. It's the flip side of the inevitability tack: you see, even if we lose, it's inevitable that we have won. Are you so stupid that you can't get it?

My high road includes holding people accountable for despicable actions.  This includes both the Clintons and their entourage.

the Clinton camp hopes that, if he is counted out, Obama, just 46, would think about his long-term future and secure his own status as heir apparent by reconciling his followers to a bitter but temporary defeat and by throwing all his energies behind Clinton.... Only Obama can make her winning seem right.

But the Clinton supporters were stomping on Howard Dean for saying exactly that a week ago, that the loser is more important in bringing their supporters to the winner's side. They've been trying to play the victim yet again while furiously trying to get Obama supporters to unilaterally disarm.

The unbelievable dishonesty some of the Clinton bloggers have been displaying in this primary is making me reevaluate just about everything they've written and argued in the past since they're now proving themselves to be such unprincipled liars.

I agree that Obama would undoubtedly take the high road and do what's best for the party if he loses the nomination, no matter how that might come about.

...the Clinton camp hopes that, if he is counted out, Obama, just 46, would think about his long-term future and secure his own status as heir apparent by reconciling his followers to a bitter but temporary defeat and by throwing all his energies behind Clinton.

Make no mistake about it - if the Clintons steal this thing from Obama then Rush Limbaugh's hopes will be child's play compared to what actually unfolds, no matter what kind of conciliatory speech Barack Obama might give. Another Luo denied by the machinations of the majority? OK, just try it...

The Underground Railroad

Another part of the Clinton campaign's argument has been the "popular vote." The campaign's touting of the PV is no doubt expedient, considering Hillary's relative unpopularity with the Democratic Party's most active members and her campaign's "big state" strategy, which intentionally placed less emphasis on winning the small states using caucuses. But the PV argument required actually winning the PV in order to be plausible, and an inconvenient fact got in the way -- She wasn't.

The next choice war clear -- rather than let an inconvenient fact get in the way of a perfectly good argument, an undeterred Clinton still announced she had taken the lead in the PV after the Pennsylvania primary.

"I'm very proud that as of today, I have received more votes by the people who have voted than anyone else.." -- HRC

Of course, clever math had much to do with her purported lead in the mythical PV race. And this new form of fuzzy math required even more than simply including Michigan and Florida, because some of the states had never bothered to keep track of the PV. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since they were caucus states, and, as we all know, they shouldn't count anyway.

Under Hillary Rules, Clinton throws out the "votes by the people who have voted" in the states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington, because those were caucus states, where popular vote tallies were not officially kept and where, by the way, Obama won three out of the four contests.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9994.html

"..the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. .. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked.." - Goering

If Obama were to have his nomination stolen and then actually worked for the thief, it would prove that he was too much of a marshmallow to be President.