How the Game is Played

It's worth taking a moment to reflect tonight on the peerless mastery of the Clintons.

* First they manage to game the press into believing that anything short of a total Obama rout on Super Tuesday counts as a tie, no matter how unlikely his victory seemed on Tuesday morning;

* Then they stage a phony campaign cash crisis, which tricks everybody (myself included) into prematurely dancing on Hillary's grave, again;

* They follow this up with a fundraising rush that brings in 3 million dollars less than Barack but somehow seems to get more press;

* Meanwhile they've got surrogates floating a new and potentially devastating anti-Obama meme, "Obama supporters are naive cultists," which brilliantly works to leverage his charisma and devoted support against him;

* They've got everyone in agreement that if Obama loses even a single state in the next month, it doesn't matter how many of the others he wins;

* And she's apparently going to spend the rest of the month following him around the country asking "Why won't you debate me?", a position of weakness the press will be all-too-happy to misunderstand as strength.

I'm worried that Obama's people are busy fighting the last war, and they're allowing (or perhaps have already allowed) Clinton's camp to set the terms for the coming contests.

I still think Barack ultimately wins this thing, but after two days of increasing confidence I'm definitely starting to feel the heat again. If he can beat the Clintons, there's nothing the Republicans can throw at him that scares me. There's just no one better.