Dust That Last Week Off, Folks. Obama's Back.

A little anecdote from Youngstown, Ohio, where I worked on the Obama campaign for a week:

It's election night, at about 7:30.  A group of volunteers are cleaning up the main campaign staging area, preparing to go to the rented banquet hall to watch the returns.

I turned to a staffer--a guy we'll call Chris--who was assigned to run a field office in Pennsylvania, and who had taken a couple of days to help in Ohio.  For the first time that week, I raised the courage to ask, "What do you think?  We gonna win this thing?"

Chris immediately said, "No, I think we lose Ohio by 12 to 14 points and reach a delegate draw in Texas."  Very simple, very matter-of-fact.  A prediction of defeat while putting away folding chairs.

But then he said:

But I don't think it matters, frankly.  We keep it close, and there's no way she catches us in delegates or the popular vote.

And to tell you the truth, I know all these guys here are tired and have been campaigning since Iowa, and want it to be done tonight, but I honestly wouldn't mind this thing going to Pennsylvania.

Because although she will probably win there, it will not be enough, and we will have built a massive ground operation in Pennsylvania for the general while McCain is out sunning himself in Arizona, having wrapped things up.

Chris said this not with arrogance, but with the type of grounded, we've-thought-this-through attitude of someone who knows a plan to victory has been carefully laid down and is being followed.  It wasn't cockiness--I knew cockiness from friends who worked on the Clinton campaign and who doled out cockiness from the vintage cask of 2007 with self-certainty that was breathtaking and ultimately breathtakingly wrong.  It was faith in plan.        

****

For the last two weeks Obama supporters have run pell mell in varying degrees of panic, terrified that something had fundamentally shifted away from Obama and to Clinton.  "It was that SNL skit!"  "That 3 a.m. call killed us!" "She's clubbing us with NAFTA!"  "He needs to fight back!"  "He's going to be another Kerry!"

Admit it.  Around here things were a little like this:

It didn't need to be.  Faith in plan.  

For while Clinton was throwing the the kitchen sink at Obama and many of us were in massive hand-wringing mode, people were
saying reasonable, level things like this:

Hillary Clinton may be poised for a big night tonight, with wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island. Clinton aides say this will be the beginning of her comeback against Barack Obama. There's only one problem with this analysis: they can't count.

I'm no good at math either, but with the help of Slate’s Delegate Calculator I've scoped out the rest of the primaries, and even if you assume huge Hillary wins from here on out, the numbers don't look good for Clinton....

So no matter how you cut it, Obama will almost certainly end the primaries with a pledged-delegate lead, courtesy of all those landslides in February. Hillary would then have to convince the uncommitted superdelegates to reverse the will of the people. Even coming off a big Hillary winning streak, few if any superdelegates will be inclined to do so. For politicians to upend what the voters have decided might be a tad, well, suicidal.

And while Wolfson and Penn were trying two fundamentally incongruous lines of attack on an eager media by painting Obama as somehow not having crossed the Commander-in-Chief "threshhold" while remaining qualified to be VP, and we were watching the clock wondering when, if Obama would hit back, smarter people than many of us were calmly and rationally noting that Obama's "bad week" was really just not another extraordinarily good week

As Clinton gears up her efforts for coup by super delegate, threatening civil war within the party, it bears noting that in her best week of the campaign since her New Hampshire victory, she actually lost ground in the race.

And while Ed Rendell appeared on Meet The Press offering a contrived, logically bereft, and non-reality-based justification for the overturning of voter will and all rational thought in a Quixotic quest for the nomination, Barack Obama was purposefully working to achieve a win here:

No, wait.  That can't be right.  Although....although that shape looks....oddly....familiar.   This means something...

Anyway, I meant here:

And this morning, as I sat at my computer wondering yet again whether this would be the start of another "bad" week for the Obama campaign, I was greeted with headlines such as these:

OBAMA ACCUSES CLINTON OF USING "REPUBLICAN TACTICS"

and

OBAMA ADVISER SAYS CLINTON MUST REPUDIATE BACKER'S COMMENTS

and

OBAMA REJECTS VP TALK.

Like Clement Moore's awe-struck, pajama'd, nightime sash-tearer, what to my wondering eyes did appear?  But the MSM with reports of Obama fighting back.  

Let me repeat that.  Because it bears repeating.

The media of various stripes has various reports of Obama fighting back and taking the offensive to Clinton.  Directly.  

Somebody out there pinch me.  

And then note the date.  

Because today there is a bit of a different scent being carried to me on the salty air.  It smells a bit like the tide, turning.  Sniff sniff.   Do you smell it?  The turning tide, and something else.  Something....sweet.  Something...delicious.

Someone's got a milkshake.  

And Obama's about to drink it up.  

"And pretend I have a straw that goes waaaaaaay over to here."

The kitchen sink has been tossed at Obama, but it wasn't the awesome juggernaut I think they thought it would be.  Instead, it was sort of tossed like one of those balsa set pieces Luthor's henchmen used to throw at Superman, and Superman just sort of stands there and it sort of bounces off him and breaks apart, and he puts his fists on his hips and smiles, and that smile says one thing: Baby, if that's all you've got, you better run.

You know the pose I mean.

Yeah.  That one.

****

Pennsylvania is a little over six weeks from now.  Clinton may take it, I don't know.  Maybe she will and maybe she won't.  Maybe it doesn't matter in the end.

But what I do know is that if Barack Obama can weather a bad couple of weeks and actually come out ahead with renewed discipline, more delegates, more votes, more money, and more support than before.....well, hell, I can climb once again behind the wheel of my car and drive up to the Keystone State to see if I can't help Obama make Hillary work for whatever meager leavings she takes from there.  If any.

Hillary's made my guy work hard the last couple of weeks.  Now it's her turn to sweat.  For the next six.  

Sun's out, boys and girls.  The coffee break is over.  

Obama's about to hit the state of Pennsylvania running, and I intend to tighten my chinstrap and join him on the field.  Having done it before, I can tell you, being on the ground with like-minded warriors is more than worth it.  

More than worth it.    

Plenty of room on the field for you, too.