Great Expectations

By nature, I wouldn't say I'm a gambling man.

Sure, I take some chances now and then. I've filled out the NCAA Tournament brackets whenever I've been working in an office where that sort of thing is done. A few times in my life, I've gone to the horse track.

I'm certainly not an habitual gambler.

But, if it were possible to do such a thing, I'd be willing to bet that Hillary Clinton never expected things to turn out the way they seem to have turned out in this election season.

I think that would be a pretty safe bet.

She believed her role would be historic, that she would be smashing another barrier for women. The history books would list her as the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party, and they might record her as the first woman elected president.

That's what I think she (and many of her supporters) envisioned when she embarked on her campaign to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

She didn't think there was any chance that, in the history books that have yet to be written, her role in the 2008 campaign would turn out to be that, by April, she would be the lone roadblock remaining in the nomination path of Barack Obama, seeking to be the first black presidential nominee.

Obama's path to the nomination has been taking on the look of historical inevitability in the last couple of months. Those candidates who have served as temporary obstacles to his coronation in Denver in August will be remembered as footnotes in the history books.

A clear sign of that sense of inevitability comes when writers are using that word to describe your opponent's campaign.

"With Sen. Hillary Clinton widely expected to win Pennsylvania's Democratic primary on Tuesday, most of the focus is on the margin," Amy Chozick writes in the Wall Street Journal. "Anything less than a double-digit victory could solidify the perception that Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is the inevitable Democratic nominee."

The latest player in this game of Great Expectations would be Pennsylvania. The Democrats in that state will vote on Tuesday, and the prevailing wisdom is that Clinton will win. But the margin is what counts now. As Chozick observes, if Clinton wins by less than double digits, Obama may as well be the winner.

Margins won't really matter in November. In most states, a candidate will receive all of a state's electoral votes if he/she merely receives more popular votes than the other candidate.

But in the race for the Democratic nomination, margins affect how many delegates a candidate receives at the national convention from a given state.

And, at this stage of the campaign, Clinton needs to win in Pennsylvania by such a convincing margin that she not only gains ground in the delegate count but she also creates enough doubt about Obama in the minds of voters that her victory has a "domino effect" on the remaining primaries.

That's the only way, many political experts say, that she can salvage her campaign and be nominated for the presidency.

Is it possible? Well, that remains to be seen.

The latest polls I've seen show Clinton's lead in Pennsylvania dwindling to a few percentage points.

Rasmussen Reports says Clinton's lead is 3 points, 47% to 44%. Zogby reports nearly the same numbers, although it finds that Clinton leads by 1 more percentage point, 47% to 43%.

Public Policy Polling sees a volatile race that has been swinging from one candidate to the other in recent weeks -- and currently favors Obama, 45% to 42%.

Survey USA is the only survey I've seen with polling results that show Clinton even approaching the kind of margin she needs, 54% to 40%.

If Obama truly has a date with destiny, then he's not out of the woods, even if he holds Clinton to a three- or four-point margin -- or if he wins Pennsylvania, as Public Policy Polling suggests could be possible.

His recent remarks haven't been laid to rest yet. They're still sources of trouble for him, and they will remain so in Republican hands this fall if he doesn't deal with them.

Kimberly Strassel is clear, in the Wall Street Journal, what she thinks Obama's mistakes were.

"He has likely given Hillary Clinton a new lease on the Pennsylvania primary," she says.

As I just pointed out, the polls aren't showing that kind of shift in momentum -- yet. But such shifts have been known to occur in the final weekend before a primary or election.

"He's given Mrs. Clinton fresh superdelegate ammunition," Strassel continues. And "'Yes We Can' has devolved into 'Who the Heck Is This Guy?'"

Byron York points out, in The Hill, that sometimes the attempt to explain an ill-chosen word, like "bitter," or a poorly expressed analogy, as Obama was guilty of in Wednesday night's debate, can be damaging on their own.

"Would you rather be associated with a ’60s radical who plotted to bomb the Pentagon and to this day believes, as he said a few years ago, 'I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough,'" writes York, "or would you rather be associated with -- slight pause, please -- Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)?"

The "'60s radical" is William Ayers of the notorious Weather Underground. Obama acknowledged being acquainted with Ayers. He also acknowledged begin acquainted, in a collegial sort of way, with Senate colleague Coburn.

Obama and Coburn are polar opposites politically.

"Obama needs to tell us more about his relationship with Ayers," York says. "It’s important because voters might well wonder whether that relationship, coupled with Obama’s longtime relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is the beginning of a pattern ... in which Obama seems quite comfortable with people who really, really, really don’t like the United States of America.

"It’s a reasonable question, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) was right to suggest that Republicans will raise it in the general election campaign if Obama is the Democratic candidate."

They might be even more inclined to ask questions when they stop and think that "Hanoi Jane" Fonda has given her informal endorsement to the Obama campaign.

A savvy advertising man doesn't need much more to "connect the dots" for a TV viewer. The Weather Underground and "Hanoi Jane" were pretty powerful symbols of the radical left during the Vietnam era.

Paul Krugman suggests, in the New York Times, that Obama should be more concerned about his incorrect assertions than his word choice, and he may be right about that.

"There are, indeed, towns where the mill closed during the 1980s and nothing has replaced it," Krugman writes. "But the suggestion that the American heartland suffered equally during the Clinton and Bush years is deeply misleading. In fact, the Clinton years were very good for working Americans in the Midwest, where real median household income soared before crashing after 2000."

Obama should remember that, whatever one thinks of him personally, Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus.

No matter what he does between now and January, George W. Bush will leave office with a budget deficit.

I doubt anyone expected that eight years ago.