Hillary won't leave yet

She beats Obama by 9.2%, less than the 10% most experts agreed would be needed to stay in the race. However, she remains formidable for one very important reason: she wins the Democratic voters that the party most wants to win, who are the working-class white men. Obama couldn't connect with them. What's also nagging me is that he hasn't won a single big "swing" state other than Illinois. Hillary took all the others. In Pennsylvania, she won big in 70% of the state, and Obama only won big in Philadelphia. Hillary takes the old voters, Obama the younger. She gets lower-income voters, he gets the affluent.

Surprising: today on NPR, Obama's spokesman said that Obama had gotten more overall votes than Clinton, and that per recent polling he does better against McCain in a general election than Clinton in all of those big states where Hillary won. I haven't seen the polling data, but if that's true, that would be one thing to hang your I'm-for-Obama hat on.

I'm not sure where I fall with this protracted contest. Many of the more cynical political bloggers are proclaiming McCain as the winner in last night's primary. As long as he's the only presumptive nominee out there, he's the only one who gets to present a national campaign strategy and frame a national message without the distraction of having to run against anyone in his own party. Obama occasionally tries on the nominee's clothes, but at most it's a tux rental that he has to return the next day or pay extra. Clinton still portrays herself as the one who's ready to lead, but where that is, I'm not sure. Obama seems to want to lead us away from polarization, and I like that. I certainly don't agree with Republicans on most things, and the more that they lean towards Christianism, the less I resonate with any of their positions on issues. But enough damage has been done to this country and we don't need four more years of political skullduggery, the way the GOP tried to take down Bill Clinton, and the way they took down Gore and Kerry (and let's not forget good ol' Max Cleland). Putting Hillary in the White House will certainly make it easier for the Republicans to go on hating, because she's a Democrat, because she's a Clinton, and because she's a she.

I got an email from a colleague who said some Europeans were predicting McCain would win by boiling it down this way:

On one side, you have a bitch who is a lawyer, married to a lawyer, running against a lawyer who is married to a bitch who is a lawyer. On the other side, you have a war hero married to a good looking woman with big tits who owns a beer distributorship.

Is there a really contest here?