Quotes From Around Yon Primarysphere

I think there's a Democratic nominee now.

-- KARL ROVE

But Obama fans, now is time to batten down the hatches, because the next few weeks will not be pretty. Clinton will romp in West Virginia, where the Obama campaign isn't really making a full effort. Obama will probably hit the "magic number"—a guaranteed majority of pledged delegates—two weeks from now when Oregon votes, but Clinton's likely win in Kentucky will keep her in the race.

-- NICK BEAUDROT

Here's what now seems obvious: African-American voters killed the Clinton candidacy. It is a fitting end to the Clintons' campaign and an almost Shakespearean coda to their career. The Clintons were exposed in their long-running exploitation and reliance on minority votes. No group was more loyal to them than African-Americans; and in the end, like everyone else, African-Americans realized that the Clintons are frauds, disloyal to the core, cynical to their finger-tips, and finally, finally, returned the favor.

-- ANDREW SULLIVAN

Clinton won Indiana by 23,000 votes. That means if 12,000 late-deciding Indianans woke up on the other side of the bed, or saw one fewer Clinton ad, or had one more conversation with their Obama-loving granddaughter, the election would be for all practical purposes completely over.

-- JONATHAN STEIN

As the race for the White House enters its "malaise phase," with Democratic candidates struggling to set a world record for talking out of both sides of their mouths without their lips moving while John McCain struggles just to get a word in edgewise, I have caught myself several times the last few weeks trying to shake the feeling of dread – the cold hand of history clapped around my shoulders, its icy grip reminiscent of a time when the world seemed to be spinning out of control and the American people made a conscious decision to radically alter the political landscape in Washington.

I am speaking of 1980, of course.

. . . My gut feeling – totally speculative at this point – is that the race between Obama and McCain will be close until after the debates are over – about two weeks before the campaign ends. At that point, I think voters will start to break heavily for the Democrats and it will be something of a rout. Perhaps not a 1980 style kick in the groin rejection of one party for another. But I fully expect the GOP to get slapped pretty hard by the electorate – well deserved in my view.

-- RICK MORAN

We've seen our last First Lady of a certain kind. Genteel, always attempting to be background instead of foreground or middle ground. Laura Bush will likely be the last of a long line of smart women who stayed behind the scenes for the most part, or else led lives "out there" like Eleanor Roosevelt who most of the time seemed as though she wasn’t married to the President, but rather to ideas.

-- CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS

She loves to sit, throw 'em back. So to me this is nothin' new. We all hear about the story that she and John McCain actually had a shot contest, I think in the Ukraine or somewhere around the world. And she actually beat John McCain in a shot contest. She's a girl from Illinois who likes to throw 'em down with the rest of us.

-- TERRY McAULIFFE

So it ends not with a bang but a whimper, the slow dribbling away of her "tiebreaker" victory in Indiana as Barack Obama seals the nomination in North Carolina, "a big state, a swing state," as he put it, and more to the point, a state that gave him a resounding margin after the Jeremiah Wright disaster brought his viability into question.

The chatter about Florida and Michigan, the blather about remaining primaries should start to fade as the superdelegate slide toward Obama begins in earnest and the Democratic Party gets itself together for November.

-- ROBERT STEIN

The numbers are in and they confirm what has been obvious for, oh, 30 years now: Rush Limbaugh is an egotistical buffoon who, in fact, has no influence on anything but the opinions of his few gullible dittohead listeners.

The way it’s looking now, Republicans, who account for 11% of the entire Indiana electorate, have voted for Hillary by the same margin that the entire state has. Stick to ruining your own party, Rush. Lord knows you’ve done a fantastic job at that.

-- SILENT PATRIOT

McCain's fall has been Shakespearean -- and really hard to watch for those, like myself, who so admired and even loved him. His nobility and his true reformer years have given way to pandering in the service of ambition.

But a large portion of the electorate hasn't noticed the Shakespearean fall. How else to explain The 28/48 Disconnect -- wherein only a die-hard 28 percent of voters still approve of Bush, but 48 percent say they'd vote for McCain, who is running on the "more of the same" platform?

The thing is, these voters clearly still think of McCain as the maverick of 2000, a straight shooter who would never seek the embrace of a man he couldn't bring himself to vote for, nor accept the regular counsel of Karl Rove, the man behind the vile, race-baiting attacks on him during the 2000 campaign.

And the main reason for The 28/48 Disconnect is the mainstream media's ongoing membership in the John McCain Protection Society. They too continue to party -- and report on McCain -- like it's 1999.

-- ARIANNA HUFFINGTON

Cartoon by Mike Lester/Rome (N.Y.) News-Tribune