Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

• Democratic voters - they turned out in record numbers across the country
• Mike Huckabee - two man race? Wing man? How about future running mate?
• Future primary states - States like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, D.C., Virginia, Louisiana and even Hawaii still matter, and their media outlets are about to get crazy paid by Team Obama...
• Hispanic voters - they were the talk of the town tonight, particularly in California, where they and a 55 percent proportion of women voters in the electorate made the difference for Hillary
• Barack Obama - he won more states than Hillary (13 versus 9) and may have edged her out in delegates. He didn't grab California or New Jersey, and he didn't run Hillary out of town, so the media is calling it a letdown, but a letdown opens the door for a comeback. Plus, he's got more money than Hillary going into the next round of primaries.
  
• Camp Hillary - they got to stick it to the Kennedys and to the media on the same night, surviving the Obama phenomenon and oddly -- winning fewer states than Barack (including the two states she was supposed to win anyway ... New York and California and doing so mainly on the basis of absentee ballots and early votes she banked well before Obama's media surge began...) but probably winning the news cycle anyway.
• John McCain - he survived the barrage of hateration from the conservative movement to emerge as the clear Republican front runner. Now, the bastards have to deal with him ... and his friend Bob Dole, too...
• Caucuses - they did quite nicely tonight, without the nasty computer glitches.
• White voters - they're in style again, with the pundit class closely watching how many of them Barack Obama can win.
• California - it actually got media attention this year.
• Neocons - John McCain solidifies their hold on the Republican Party, keeps their dream of perpetual war in Iraq alive, and helps them shake off those pesky social, fiscal and other actual conservatives once and for all...
• Race neutrality - Barack carried states that are whiter than white, like Missouri, North Dakota and Utah, and it appears that many white voters have grown beyond the politics of race.
  
• Change - everybody's talking about it now, even John McCain, who has built his campaign around the idea of continuing George W. Bush's disastrous foreign policy.
  
• Political junkies (like me) - this thing keeps rolling on.
  

• Pollsters. Jeez, people, just give it up. John Zogby has got to be stone drunk tonight...
• Electronic voting machines - Again, can we just give them up and go back to paper ballots?
• Rush Limbaugh - (and his coterie of copycat broadcasters.) All their braying couldn't save Mitt Romney or stop John McCain.
• Mitt Romney - he won 6 states and still looks like a loser. Now the pundit class is looking for him to hang up his medals and drop out of the race.
• Black voters - they're now the red headed step child of this election. Obama gets 80 percent of them, it hurts his credibility as a cross-over candidate. Clinton gets 13 percent of them, down in Jeb Bush territory, and it doesn't really matter. Many of their own elected officials have thrown their candidate of choice under the bus. And they've officially been replaced by Hispanic voters as the "must have" constituency for Democrats.
• The Kennedys - Suddenly, they don't seem so clout-filled anymore, particularly with Hillary losing them, but winning Massachusetts and California anyway.
• Endorsements - they didn't seem to matter this cycle, particularly those of senators and governors.
• Conservatives - they've lost their party to the neocons (who don't really care about social issues, illegal immigration or tax cuts), their pundit class has pinned its hopes on a guy who was a liberal Republican living in Massachusetts up until about five minutes ago, and their other candidate, Mike Huckabee, is hated by the Club for Growth and only appeals to those among them who don't believe in evolution. Many hours of therapy and gallons of alcoholic beverages may be needed to get this crowd through this election season.
  

Labels: 2008 election, Super Tuesday