The Hammond Report

The Democrats are in a pickle. While Obama has secured enough delegates to win the nomination, Hillary is not giving up. The MSM is going nuts.

From Maureen Dowd writing in the NYT:

But even as Obama was trying to savor, Hillary was refusing to sever. Ignoring the attempts of Obama and his surrogates to graciously say how «extraordinary» she was as they showed her the exit, she and a self-pitying Bill continued to pull focus. Outside Baruch College, where she was to speak, her fierce feminist supporters screamed «Denver! Denver! Denver!»

«What does Hillary want?» she mused, in her most self-aware moment in some time. «I will be making no decisions tonight,» she concluded, asking fans to go to her Web site to share their thoughts.

Dowd even brought up questions about Obama's toughness and manliness:

And, even though Democrats were no longer listening, Hillary's camp radiated the message that Obama was a sucker who had played by the rules on Florida and Michigan, and then reached an appeasing compromise, and that such a weak sister could never handle Putin or I'm-A-Dinner-Jacket.

by broadcasting that she's open to being Obama's running mate, she puts public pressure on him similar to the sort of pressure Walter Mondale was under from rampaging feminists when he put Geraldine Ferraro on the ticket. Mondale ended up seeming henpecked, as Obama would seem if he caved to the women who say they will write in Hillary's name or vote for anti-choice McCain before they'd vote for Obama.

From Howard Kurtz writing in the Washington Post:

«The drama has drained out of it,» says Walter Shapiro, Salon's Washington bureau chief. «I've been writing these pieces so long that I've started doing Nexis searches on my own sentences to make sure I'm not plagiarizing something on Hillary getting out of the race.»

Barack Obama's victory may be historic, but even some black commentators have tired of the endless denouement. Callie Crossley, for example, is a Harvard media analyst, but «as a normal person, I think, 'Oh my God, I'm so sick of it I can hardly stand it.' And then I chastise myself.» She says she clicks off any television story about delegate numbers.

«We're not even limping,» Crossley says, «we're just dragging across the finish line, and everyone says, 'Oh, okay, whatever.' It feels redundant.»

I call it Obama Fatigue.

Some think this will go through to Denver.

From Kurtz:

«I won't believe it till Denver,» says Chuck Todd, NBC's political director, referring to the Democratic convention in August. Reached on a plane awaiting takeoff to New York for last night's show-closing Montana and South Dakota contests, he says: «The last three primary nights have been the definition of deja vu all over again. Pretty much since Texas, you kind of knew that this thing might be on its way to being over, but we kept reporting on it every week.»

From Dowd:

She just urged her supporters to keep the dream alive, and talked privately about what she would settle for. She has told some Democrats recently that she wanted Obama to agree to allow a roll call vote, like days of yore, so that the delegates of states she won would cast the first ballot for her at the convention. She said she wanted that for her daughter.

Obama supporters are worried that it's a trick and she'll somehow snatch away the nomination. Just as Hillary supporters have hardened toward him, many of Obama's donors and fans have hardened against the Clintons, saying it would be disillusioning to see them on a ticket that's supposed to be about fresh politics.

Chaotic, isn't it?