Hello everybody. I have just summoned the energy to reengage in this discussion here at MyDD. Like many of you I experienced a severe primary burnout syndrome from which I am just now recovering. While I was feverish with excitement at the thought of an Obama victory back in the heady days of March, the long slog through the rest of the primary campaign had the unfortunate effect of dulling the thrill and causing a bit of anticlimax factor when Obama finally pulled it out.

So I have taken some time away from the boards in order to refresh my thoughts and regain my equilibrium. I am happy to say it was a good decision, as I now emerge ready to duke it out with a more appealing combatant, John McCain. I take solace from the near unanimity of the polls in favor of Obama, though I am mindful that nobody won an election based on June polling. I am also heartened by what appears to be a slow but inexorable healing process here on MyDD.

The fall campaign is lining up to be a momentous one, pitting generation against generation, with incredibly important cultural and political ramifications. The key to victory will be the success (or lack thereof) of the Obama campaign in translating the appeal that the upscale, highly educated Obama voter feels for the candidate into terms that resonate with the lower income, more conservative voters in the suburban/rural areas that he needs to win. It should be a no-brainer, but we mustn't be complacent and we should push the campaign to broaden their appeal to the crucial voting blocs that went for Clinton in the primaries. Early signs look good, but lets take this thing all the way in November.

Barack Obama gave what I consider to be an overwhelmingly important and gracious speech this evening. He spent a lot of time sincerely praising Hillary Clinton for her personal strength and the strength of her campaign, as well as the groundbreaking nature of her candidacy.

He did this on the night when he might well have expected to have the stage to himself, and didn't. And he did this on a night where he might have expected Hillary Clinton to similarly (and not tepidly) praise him. This showed a tremendous amount of restraint and respect.

He then proceeded to deliver a remarkable framing of the choice between himself and McCain, turning notions of patriotism and fear-mongering on their heads. And he did so in a manner that electrified not only the crowd on hand but a nationwide audience. He announced himself forcefully and eloquently, and talked about a lot of things that supporters of Hillary Clinton are likely to care about.

So, my question dear Clinton supporters (or at least the ones still holding out against Obama)....did this speech do anything to move you to him personally or politically. I hope it did but I am curious to hear some responses.

So this is what it has come down to for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008. Next Tuesday night, all of the votes in the primary season will have been decided, a compromise will have been reached on FL and MI and the party will come together around our presumptive nominee. One more week and the party will sail into the General Election with a freshly minted new standard bearer, the groundbreaking Senator from Illinois Barack Obama. All of the intra-party huffing and puffing of the nomination battle can finally dissolve into the steely intensity and unified purpose of the General Election. Democrats of all stripes can come together under the banner of a new generation of leadership, ready to expand the electoral map and work with our partners in the congress for a true period of realignment in American politics.

No matter who your horse is/was in this nomination battle I think it will quickly become apparent that we have made the right choice. The strategic and message discipline of the Obama team's nomination campaign will have placed us on solid ground for the fall and the intensity of participation on the Democratic side provides a springboard of energy that will catapult Obama to a powerful position as the General gets underway in earnest.

I just feel it in my bones.

This is going to be the most fulfilling and reassuring election in modern American political history. The youth and groundbreaking nature of Obama comes at just the right time in our political cycle (and for our tattered national psyche).  I fear not that Obama will fail to win over our brethren from the Clinton camp. So many of the things that consume these boards now will be nothing more than amusing memories as we rise up to meet our real opponents head on, with the political landscape breaking in our favor.

This is my vision for the summer, and it begins next week!

Why is it that day after day we are bombarded with front page threads like today's from Jerome, hashing out the various permutations of the popular vote?

First of all, there is no way to accurately count the popular vote in the Democratic nominating process. Given the fact that many of the caucus states don't report their totals, and that Obama was not on the ballot in MI (in anticipation of the "he took his name off himself" comments I will say that why he took his name off the ballot doesn't have anything to do with the fact that nonetheless you can't count Michigan's popular vote accurately) popular vote is not something that can be used to fairly decide the nomination, nor was it ever something that was being considered as being relevant to the outcome going in.

In fact, in Jerome's post there is lots of talk about how Obama is winning in 4 of the 6 ways of measuring but that Hillary might be able to overcome him in two of these with a big win in PR. That right there tells you that this is an absurd way of measuring who should be the nominee. Should we split the nomination into six?

Like it or not, we have a system of representative democracy in which popular vote does not technically count, in terms of how it represents the final outcome. In every election we select delegates who vote on our behalf. The popular vote, while reflective of the will of the people generally, is relegated to a secondary factor. MyDD poster Professor Reo responded to Jerome's post by saying that us Democrats would have been thrilled to win the presidency in 2004 had Ohio gone our way, despite the fact that Bush won by 3 million votes overall.

So why oh why do we keep seeing Jerome and others agonizing over the various permutations of the mythic, impossible to accurately tabulate, popular vote?

After reading all the doom and gloom and bickering in the rec list and elsewhere on this site, I just need to post a thread talking about how, after the most talked about, scintillating and envigorating primary season in my memory, I am so excited and pleased Barack Obama will be the nominee of the party. I refuse to get caught up in the back and forth between Clinton and Obama camps anymore. I just want to breath in and think of how proud I am of our party, and of our nation. I have never before invested so heavily in a candidate, either financially or emotionally, and it is all paying off. I really hope a few other people around here can join me in experiencing a few moments of real, unadulterated, non-cynical joy at the prospect of President Obama taking the oath of office next January. Won't we project such a different and better face to the world?

WOW! What cool and thoughtful dialogue we have going in here. Thanks to everybody who is arguing and discussing with respect. This is a cool thread.

This is a diary that seeks to explore the mystery of why the democratic primary electorate in the Appalachian region votes so differently than the rest of the country.

It seems that some people want to give West Virginia an outsized influence in the debate over whether or not Barack Obama has a problem securing the vote of blue collar white voters. I do not pretend to be able to dissect the psychology of these voters, and certainly do not ascribe to them any nefarious motivations such as fear of an African American candidate. But for whatever reason WVa's white voters turned out for Clinton in numbers that are different from white voters in most other parts of the country.

Yesterday, another poster had a chart up that showed the counties nationwide in which Hillary Clinton had won by margins larger than 65-35. Almost all of these counties came in Appalachia, and the only hole in the Appalachian section of the map at this point were the states of WVa and KY. Filling them in completes the cycle of Appalachian regions that Clinton can expect to win overwhelmingly. Again, why this is, I have no idea but it is so clearly regionally delineated that I feel I can say that with good confidence that Obama has a problem among Appalachian voters (and I say this as a strong Obama supporter).

At this point in this long race, Obama has won in predominantly white states on the west coast, the plains, the midwest, and the southeast. This demonstrates a breadth of support that is not shaken by the mysterious loss of support in Appalachia. It is foolish to suggest that because Obama seems to not connect with voters in Appalachia that he can't win the general, or even that he wouldn't be as strong a candidate as HRC.

For just a wee, brief moment on late Tuesday night early Weds morning this website was over-run with a valuable commodity that has been sorely lacking at this site--a realistic portrait of the state of the Democratic race. Todd and Jerome both posted front page stories that indicated a nuanced sense of the race, that acknowleged that Obama was the presumptive nominee and that had thoughtful analyses about why this was and what to do moving forward.

Since that brief window, we have seen some major regression on this front and a drift back to the land of "she can still pull it off, the race is still fluid" absurdity. How long are you guys going to allow this site to be so far outside the drift of reality based politics. We are counting on you to become leaders in the coming fight against McCain. Please provide us with more of the kinds of reality based blogging you posted ever so briefly this week.

I say this not to be inflammatory but to point out the value in what I am advocating. Todd's post on Tuesday night provoked some of the most thoughtful exchanges between Obama and Clinton supporters that I have seen on line. This kind of "airing the laundry" is exactly what we are all going to need to repair the rifts that have developed.

So, consider this an open plea for well rounded, realistic discussion of the state of the race. Continuing to hype Clinton's chances in the face of all evidence is not serving anybody but the people who are invested in holding their grudges.

Thanks in advance.

Here's the link to Todd's thread Tuesday night and subsequent valuable discussion....http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/5/7/53225/37686#commenttop

A few days ago Jerome posted something that irked me, that somehow there was some "Obama of February" who no longer exists. I desperately wanted to believe he was wrong and tonight I feel confident that he was. Both in the electoral results and in his oratory tonight Barack Obama was every bit the electrifying and paradigm shifting candidate that he was in winning 11 primaries in a row in February. He showed a side of himself in that speech that clearly demonstrated why he is running, what he stands for, and why he loves the country. And he returned again and again to the notion of uniting the country across all manner of artificial boundaries. This was the Obama that electrified the country earlier in this campaign and I hope that Jerome will wake up Wednesday morning and concede this point.

And to top it off I think it was the gas tax argument that put him back on his game. As much as Jerome wanted to believe that it was a winning issue for clinton I think tonight's results show that Obama got the better of this argument by trusting the American people to understand the truth.

What a night!!!!