Free Republic

Elite opinion on the Democratic race has congealed around the idea that it is over. Clinton has no chance whatsoever to win the nomination now. There is a minority of analysts out there - maybe 5%, maybe even less - who see her path to the nomination as much narrower than it was four days ago, but who still see a path. I'm with the minority on this one. I think she is nearly finished, but not quite yet. As those who know me in personal life can attest, I am a contrarian. For better or worse, when I see...

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton struck a publicly defiant posture on Wednesday about continuing her presidential bid despite waning support from Democratic officials and donors. Some of her advisers acknowledged privately that they remained unsure about the future of her candidacy. With the political world trained on Mrs. Clinton’s financial and electoral viability, Senator Barack Obama moved closer to becoming the first African-American presidential nominee of a major party. Mr. Obama spent the day at home in Chicago, after increasing his delegate lead in Tuesday’s primaries — a result that led David Plouffe, a top Obama aide, to say on Wednesday,...

The game-changing events in the 2008 campaign are issues of war and peace. Both may be in play between now and November, in ways that add extra volatility to the presidential race. Let's start with war: The United States is already fighting two of them, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But judging from recent statements by administration officials, there is also a small, but growing, chance of conflict with Iran. The administration is signaling the Iranians that they need to stop supplying and training Shiite militias in Iraq -- or run the risk of U.S. retaliation. The Maliki government in Baghdad,...

All the feisty talk from Sen. Hillary Clinton and her campaign advisers Wednesday couldn't dispel the growing perception among Democrats that the party's presidential race is nearly over, and that Sen. Barack Obama is going to be the winner. Tuesday's dual primaries technically yielded a split decision, as expected. But once Democrats grasped the final results -- Sen. Clinton's near-loss in Indiana's primary, where she recently was heavily favored, and her larger-than-expected defeat in North Carolina -- the New York senator took on the air of a loser, even to many of her own supporters. "The air is completely let...

There is a high-level meeting of 49 superdelegates going on behind closed doors right now.It's the weekly party policy luncheon in the US Senate. And while there are a number of important legislative topics on the agenda (the war supplemental, a gas prices control bill, the farm bill and more) you can bet that last night's returns from Indiana and North Carolina are being discussed as senators queue up in the buffet line. Going into the lunch, reporters asked senators for their assessments. On his way to lunch, Sen. Teddy Kennedy, D-Mass, one of Sen. Barack Obama's, D-Ill., high...

This past Friday Michelle Obama gave essentially the same stump speech in Charlotte, North Carolina that she had given the week earlier in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Based on the stump speech, Yuval Levin calls Mrs. Obama "The unhappiest millionaire." Levin's NRO column carries a link to the C-SPAN video of Mrs. Obama's North Carolina speech. It is well worth watching. Levin characterizes the pervasive themes of Mrs. Obama's stump speech as the "gospel of bitterness." Levin finds Barack Obama to be preaching a similar gospel, albeit one that benefits from "a peppier and more upbeat stump speech[.]" Senator Obama's enormous...

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is far more volatile now than it was on January 3, that distant day when hopeful Iowans trooped to their caucuses. And it is a whole lot more volatile than it was on February 19, when Barack Obama's landslide primary win in the classic "swing state" of Wisconsin seemed to confirm his inevitability. Back at the start of January, the best bet was still that New York Senator Hillary Clinton would be the nominee of a united Democratic party against some deeply dysfunctional Republican like former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney – a northeastern...

<p>The hole the US Democratic party is digging for itself just keeps getting deeper. In the past few days, after the grisly reappearance of Jeremiah Wright – the former friend who came not to praise Barack Obama but to bury him – Hillary Clinton’s standing in the polls has improved again. In Tuesday’s primaries, she is hoping for a comfortable win in Indiana and a close result in North Carolina, a dramatic change from just a month ago.</p>

On April 23, Hillary Clinton, with a net gain of 214,000 Pennsylvania votes in her back pocket, set off an election firestorm by claiming she had slipped ahead of Barack Obama in the popular vote total. “I’m very proud that as of today, I have received more votes by the people who have voted than anybody else,” she told a rally in Indianapolis. Journalists immediately fact-checked the statement, pointing out that Clinton’s math relies on counting votes from Florida and Michigan. (Of course, the DNC has stripped those states of their delegates for scheduling their primaries before the party’s calendar...

POTENTIAL 2008 Democratic presidential contender Senator Russ Feingold has made an early appeal to anti-war activists and set himself apart from possible rivals by calling for a pullout of US troops from Iraq by the end of next year. No other Democrat pondering a run for the White House, nor any of the party's congressional leaders or prominent foreign policy voices, has broken with Republican President George W. Bush and endorsed a timetable for Iraq withdrawal. The lack of strong opposition on Iraq from a deeply divided Democratic Party, even as polls show growing public unhappiness with the war, has...

This is the story of a military veteran whistleblower. He spoke out against someone he thought was dangerous for the nation, talked to local newspapers, and appeared on talk shows. In return, he was vilified by reporters, threatened by a political operative, fired by his company, and now he's broke. His name is Steve Gardner. He's also known as "The 10th Brother," as in Band of Brothers. He's one of two members of Sen. John Kerry's 12 Vietnam swift boat crew members who refused to stand with Kerry at the Democratic Convention. The other man remained silent. "They said I...