Just Win, Baby

Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders football team, coined that phrase 40 years ago, and it serves as the de facto slogan of the United States of America. Because of our collective obsession with winning, Hillary Clinton's ten point victory in the Pennsylvania primary yesterday, changed perceptions in a way that belied the facts.

The facts say that she is still struggling for money, that she can't catch Barack Obama in pledged delegates, that she needs Florida and Michigan to catch him in the popular vote and that she has to just win, baby, every remaining contest to convince enough super delegates to support her for the Democratic Presidential nomination. The perception is that she's the one person who could actually pull it off.

While there has to be some hand-wringing in the Obama campaign, be assured that they were prepared for this loss. They have a fifty state strategy that clearly delineates where they'll win, where they'll lose and by how much. So far, their internal predictions have been spot on. So they won't panic. They remember when their candidate was just winning, baby. The bandwagon those eleven straight victories created was ginormous and almost forced Hillary out of the race. Now they know he has to start winning again to close the deal, which is the way it should be. If he wins North Carolina and Indiana, it's a done deal. If not, well, he's opened himself up to those pesky perceptions.

Here are some interesting questions to consider as this race moves forward:

1. Is continuing the race good or bad for the Democratic Party? In the face of the usual arguments that it's not helpful in a general election for the candidates to continue sniping at each other now, a contrarian opinion I heard suggests that it is great for the party. It keeps the focus on the Democrats, energizes the voters in the states that haven't voted yet, and most importantly, prevents John McCain from having a clear target to campaign against.

2. Polite pundits can't ask this question but Jon Stewart and I can: Is race the main factor affecting the outcomes in these blue collar states? 20% of Ohio Hillary voters flat out admitted that it was; 16% of Pennsylvanians for Hillary admitted the same. The corollary question then becomes: can Obama really win in a general when race is still a huge factor in our collective mentality? I mean, is this like a young white woman going out with a black guy but recoiling at the idea of marrying him? That's politically incorrect, but ask Harold Ford about its accuracy. He lost his senatorial race in Tennessee when a 527 ad supporting his white opponent closed with a young white woman salaciously looking into the camera and saying "Hey, Harold, call me." Apparently, the single Ford, an African-American, had been to a Playboy party, which now put him on a mission to sleep with all the ex-Chi O's in the state. He lost by 25,000 votes.

3. Finally, one school of thought believes that Barack Obama can close the deal the minute Americans see him get tough, or in politics parlance, "take the gloves off". But how can he do that with Hillary and still be considered a uniter? Maybe by doing what he's doing now: getting tough against John McCain to show how he would do it in the general. Here's his speech last night which hints at that strategy.

So, the beat goes on. And in this country, as long as there are winners and losers, the winner gets to change perceptions, even if the victory doesn't change the facts.