Texas is must win state for Democrat nomination

NY Times:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her advisers increasingly believe that, after a series of losses, she has been boxed into a must-win position in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, and she has begun reassuring anxious donors and superdelegates that the nomination is not slipping away from her, aides said on Monday.

Mrs. Clinton held a buck-up-the-troops conference call on Monday with donors, superdelegates and other supporters; several said afterward that she had sounded tired and a little down, but determined about Ohio and Texas.

They also said that they had not been especially soothed, and that they believed she might be on a losing streak that could jeopardize her competitiveness in those states.

“She has to win both Ohio and Texas comfortably, or she’s out,” said one superdelegate who has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, and who spoke on condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment. “The campaign is starting to come to terms with that.” Campaign advisers, also speaking privately in order to speak plainly, confirmed this view.

Several Clinton superdelegates, whose votes could help decide the nomination, said Monday that they were wavering in the face of Mr. Obama’s momentum after victories in Washington State, Nebraska, Louisiana and Maine last weekend.

Some said that they, like the hundreds of uncommitted superdelegates still at stake, might ultimately “go with the flow,” in the words of one, and support the candidate who appears to show the most strength in the primaries to come.

The Clinton team moved on Monday to shift the spotlight off the candidate’s short-term challenges and focus instead on “the long run,” in the words of her senior strategist, Mark Penn.

...

You do that when you are going to lose in the short run.

Still she still has a good shot and Obama is sounding like a buffoon in reaction to the pause in the redeployment of troops from Iraq. The man is completely ignorant of military history and the logic of military actions. He has been wrong about Iraq from the beginning and is still misinformed. His desperation to lose gives him a conflict of interest in any actions he proposes.

Clinton has not been much better in pandering the the Democrats kook base, but she has a real shot in Texas where the few Democrats office holders who are left support her and she will have a large Hispanic vote to carry her. Hispanics outnumber blacks in Texas so Obama does not have any advantages in the identity politics of the state. She has also done well in the big states and Texas is the second largest state now.

Obama has been Clintonesque lately in his deliberate misstatement of McCain's position on Iraq. It could also comes from his ignorance of warfare that he thinks McCain was saying that the war could last another 100 years. What McCain was really saying was that after you win a war it is not unusual to keep troops there to secure the victory the way we did in Japan and German and South Korea. Obama could be ignorant of that history or he could just be practicing the politics of fraud.

Don Surber has an example of Obama's staff's poor judgment. The picture is from a video by Fox News Houston. In the background is the Cuban flag with a picture of Che Guevara. Hopefully it is making the rounds in the Cuban communities in Florida now. (Hat tip Larwyn.)