Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

This is an amazing story. The Democratic Party has a winner. It has a nominee. You know this because he has the most votes and the most elected delegates, and there's no way, mathematically, his opponent can get past him. Even after the worst two weeks of his campaign, he blew past her by 14 in North Carolina and came within two in Indiana.

He's got this thing. And the Democratic Party, after this long and brutal slog, should be dancing in the streets. Party elders should be coming out on the balcony in full array, in full regalia, and telling the crowd, "Habemus nominatum": "We have a nominee." And the crowd below should be cheering, "Viva Obamus! Viva nominatum!"

Instead, you know where they are, the party elders. They are in a Democratic club on Capitol Hill, slump-shouldered at the bar, having a drink and then two, in a state of what might be called depressed horror. "What are they doing to the party?" they wail. "Why are they doing this?"

You know who they are talking about.

-- PEGGY NOONAN

I’m sure pundits and historians alike will be arguing for many years about why Clinton — who enjoyed such enormous advantages going in — lost the Democratic primary. . . . ersonally, I think the explanation is quite simple. Clinton lost the nomination because of Iraq. Period.

-- PUBLIUS

Admittedly, this is the kind of counterfactual that's impossible to prove, but my guess is that if she had voted against the war Clinton would be the Democratic candidate. Given the closeness of the race, her inherent advantages going in, and that the war had to be a liability it's hard to imagine that she wouldn't have prevailed without the Iraq albatross. Whether or not Clinton's support was sincere — I don't think it really matters — sometimes getting big policies wrong really is politically damaging.

-- SCOTT LEMIEUX

What people say on the opinion pages of our nation's most prestigious newspapers has little to no effect on the outcome of elections. This is something that Republicans understand and Democrats often forget. It doesn't really matter what Gail Collins or Fred Hiatt think, nor does it matter much what George Will or Bob Herbert think . . . not for elections, anyway. But it does matter what elite opinion thinks for how history is written and for how our nation's political meta-narratives get disseminated down and out into the larger political conversations. And that does have an affect on how elections turn out and on people's permanent legacy.

George W. Bush has been a bad president, but even if he had not, his legacy would still be sullied by the nasty campaign he ran against John McCain in South Carolina. Likewise, the Clintons are now almost certainly going to lose any battle to exonerate themselves in the history books of running one of the nastiest race-based campaigns in recent memory.

-- BOOMAN

One of Barack Obama’s Middle East policy advisers disclosed yesterday that he had held meetings with the militant Palestinian group Hamas – prompting the likely Democratic nominee to sever all links with him.

-- TOM BALDWIN

What if Hillary Clinton released her income tax records showing relatively unremarkable (by senate standards, where almost everyone is fairly wealthy) income and said that Bill files separately and he's a private person so he wouldn't be releasing his?

I do not think she'd get a very easy ride from the press since Bill now makes all the money and it's against his sources of income that any potential conflicts of interest or sources of embarrassment would likely arise.

So why does John McCain get to pull the same stunt with his wife?

-- JOSH MARSHALL

On election day, Obama might have more than a million individuals volunteering on his behalf. That should scare the beejeesus out of the McCain campaign and the RNC.

-- MARK AMBINDER

Cartoon by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate