Fred Barnes is starting to like McCain's chances in November. William Voegeli at No Left Turns wonders whether a McCain presidency is inevitable. He references this article in the Economist. Three's a trend!
The argument goes like this:
1..If Clinton wins the nomination, she will be unable to unite the party. Black voters, along with most of the party's best, brightest, and most energetic, will withhold their enthusiasm and all that goes along with that. It is at best unlikely that she wins under those circumstances.
2. Clinton can't win the nomination. The odds that she will get a popular vote edge over Obama are vanishingly small. There is no way the super delegates will give her the victory if Obama has more popular votes.
3. But Obama can't win in a general election. He was weaker than Clinton in key states like Florida and Ohio, and that was before the Rev. Wright controversy. He might be about to get flattened in Pennsylvania.
Ergo: McCain can't lose.
Now I wouldn't take any of this too seriously, but it does suggest that the Democrats have more serious problems than a lot of folks imagine. There is almost always a trade off in modern elections between enthusiasm and breadth of support: to get some people to love you a lot, you have to turn off a lot of other people. Obama may be pushing the limits of that strategy. Unfortunately for Ms. C., it doesn't seem to worth the other way around. You can get a few people to really despise you without getting everyone else to like you very much. Whether all this really adds up to a McCain victory, I am sure I don't know.
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