How you doin'?Now I may be crazy, but I don't think that this is actually a terrible place for Hillary to be at this point, relatively speaking. Obviously, she would prefer to be out in the lead, or at least trading paint with Barack, but delegate-wise she's still well in contention, it's just in the realm of public perception that she's foundering. If she manages to galvanize her firewall of Latinos, blue-collar workers*, and older Dems (not to mention, uh, women**), she could easily fend Barack off in Texas, thereby shooting the tires out from under his momentum express and taking the lion's share of the 200+ delegates up for grabs in the Lone Star State. Furthermore, by getting up off the mat just as the long knives are beginning to come out, her "comeback" would appear all the more "miraculous", like Popeye downing a can of spinach and punching out forty dudes armed with machetes or something. At the very least, she'd make it a race again, and push the contest to April 22 in Pennsylvania.
For the first time in the campaign, Senator Obama is definitely in the driver's seat: ergo, he has more to lose*** March 4. Win both Texas and Ohio, and Hillary is effectively finished; the superdelegates that have thusfar been deserting her in drips and drabs will begin to abandon ship, and party leaders will start to coalesce around the presumptive nominee. No one, not even the Clintons, are going to be allowed to push this thing through the summer to the convention, not with the White House there for the taking. But if Hillary should pull out either of those two contests, well, she looked dead in the water after placing third in Iowa, and look what happened when she carried New Hampshire.
* According to exit polling I'm reading this morning, they're abandoning her.
** She barely won among women in WI.
***Well, I take that back, seeing as Hillary could actually flat out lose the nomination that day. Duh.
