It's been pretty clear that Obama knocked Hillary off her game late last fall.  She didn't see him coming, the Democratic Party establishment didn't see him coming, heck, most of his supporters admit they didn't really see him coming either.  He of the soaring rhetoric and dewy eyed optimism and she of the staggering competence and knowledge of where the bodies are buried have met at a time when either one of them would have walked away with this in Iowa, were it not for the other.

Barack Obama succeeds, IMHO, because of the unambigously disastrous Bush Administration, along with a healthy dose of disilluisonment brought on by the inaction of the 2006 Congress.  Shrub is has so thoroughly poisoned the waters of the public against its own government, that they clamor for change, any change, I don't care what kind just give me someone/something DIFFERENT!  Kind of similar to the aftermath of the Nixon/Ford era.  Jimmy Carter was swept into office with nothing more than a promise not to lie, and that turned out so well for us, didn't it?  A failed Democratic President (challenged from within for a second term, wasn't that great?), and an enduring, if not permanent, Republican preeminence in America for the next 25 years.

Pray this does not happen this time with Sen. Butterflies and Flowers.  Pray that he has steel hands under the velvet gloves.

I am working my skinny ass off to make sure that Sen. Clinton wins the nomination, but I am quite aware now that this is no longer a given.  If not for Sen. Obama, a once in a generation inspirational figure, she would have really been inevitable.  If not for Sen. Clinton, the most accomplished intellectual of the modern era, he would have been inevitable.  An embarrassment of riches that has now become just an embarrassment.  The two of them almost cancel each other out - they are two sides of the same coin of progressivism.

We just have to figure out how to make peace again after this is over...