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Clinton Supporter Lowers Bar On Success Margin Of Clinton Pennsylvania Win

Posted by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief in Politics.
Apr 15th, 2008 | Comments

Remember how most pundits wrote the conventional wisdom: that Senator Hillary Clinton was ahead by double digits in Pennsylvania and was expected to win big against her chief rival Senator Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary?

Even with the furor over Obama’s comments about small-town Americans being bitter and clinging, the conventional wisdom is that (a) Clinton should win big and (b) especially now with this controversy she should win a victory that is more than any old margin of victory.

But now a Clinton supporter has abruptly moved the goal post to the last five words of the last paragraph:

Ellen Malcolm, founder of the EMILY’s List group that’s making a major push to elect Democrat Hillary Clinton to the White House, says Clinton “has to win” Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary but any margin will do.

At a breakfast today with USA TODAY and Gannett News Service, Malcolm said the state is a test for whether Barack Obama can “close the deal” with white working-class voters. She tried to lower expectations for Clinton there.

“It’s astonishing to me that she’s doing as well as she is” when Obama is outspending her five-to-one on TV, Malcolm said of the former first lady and New York senator. “If she can pull off a win at all, that’s an incredible victory.”

So if Hillary Clinton wins by 3 or 4 points or 5 or 6 when she months ago (and even now in some polls) she was ahead by double digits, expect to hear the argument that no matter what her margin of victory Obama is unelectable.

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Mike_P

Naw, this isn't a moving of the goal post, I believe it's coordinated strategy meant to make her inevitable double-digit win there look more impressive.

I mentioned yesterday on another post that I strongly believe the polls are misleading in PA. Clinton was expected to win by double digits a month ago, and she is still likely to, though Obama has managed to narrow the numbers. Her campaign surely knows that and the gift most of the pollsters are giving her is the lowered expectations that will make the win in a state demographically tailor-made for her candidacy look surprising.

DLS

The hyperventilating lefties who are Obama cultists and hate, of all people, Hillary Clinton (with a program nearly identical to Obama's, and whose far-left politics are not successfully disguised except to those who can be easily fooled) almost as much as Bush, are beyond desperate here. They want to see PA as the death blow to the Clinton campaign.

And they'll have no clue about any party machinations to get Obama to be her VP or for him to take her as VP (were she to agree to it).

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