On the whole — except on the Right, of course — Obama’s speech is being well received. I watched Hardball, and Chris Matthews was almost as giddy about the speech as he was about Dubya’s flight suit crotch.

I think the question about the speech, articulated by Rachel Maddow on David Gregory’s new MSNBC program, is whether white America will step up and receive the speech in the same spirit in which it was given. Obama’s speech was challenging. He assumed that his audience could hear his words and and think about them. He assumed people could get beyond simple narratives, sound bytes, and jerking knees.

Steve M. wrote that it was a speech for adults, which is why it probably won’t work. (See also “It’s OK in a Roomful of Republicans.”) Will Obama face a backlash from working-class whites? the bobbleheads ask. I guess we’ll see.

Here’s the irony — The “narrative” has been that Obama is an empty suit and his supporters are brainwashed bots. Clinton is the “practical” and the “reasonable” candidate, and her supporters are people who live in the real world. But with this speech, Obama showed himself to be the intellect’s candidate, the candidate for people with functioning critical reasoning skills. (Considering he appeals to better-educated voters, one could argue that’s what he’s been all along.) On the other hand, in recent days Clinton and her supporters have been all about dog whistles and martyrdom complexes.

See also the BooMan and Pam of the House Blend.

News over the weekend is that Obama picked up more delegates in Iowa at the Iowa conventions, as most if not all delegates pledged to Edwards have now switched to Obama.

Now the Clinton campaign is trying to delay the Texas conventions and cast doubt on the results of Texas caucuses.

krikkit4 writes at Burnt Orange Report,

Hillary Clinton and her lawyers are trying to cast doubt on the precinct conventions.

Hillary Clinton and her lawyers are trying to deligitimize the concept of the convention itself.

Hillary Clinton and her lawyers are trying to drag out the delegate selection process for their benefit.

And ultimately, Hillary Clinton and her lawyers are probably trying to null and void as much of the convention/caucus aspect of Texas’ delegate selection process as possible.

I’m genuinely disgusted.

I notice the pro-Clinton blogs (you know who they are) have no problem with this. However, they are insinuating there is something shady behind Obama’s appeals to Pennsylvania Republicans and Independents to vote for him in the primary.

At least Obama is trying to win by getting people to vote for him, as opposed to tweaking election results to make them turn out “better.”

Dear television bobbleheads: The Dems are not going to win Mississippi in the general election. It doesn’t matter whether the nominee is Clinton or Obama. Ain’t gonna happen. And Obama did worse among white voters in Mississippi than in other states because of racism. Mississippi has no cosmopolitan areas like Atlanta to lift it from its sodden backwardness. You should have expected that, dear bobbleheads. Stop acting surprised.

This is reprehensible. Senator Clinton said today,

“I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold. That is a critical criterion for the next Democratic nominee to deal with.”

Clinton says she has crossed the “commander-in-chief threshold.” When, pray tell? Doing what? Can somebody explain that to me?

And I can ask the same question of McCain. I respect his prisoner-of-war experience, but being a POW doesn’t necessarily confer the commander-in-chief skill set.

Keith Olbermann is wondering if Clinton is a McCain Democrat or a Lieberman Republican. Richard Wolff suggests that all she has to do is kiss President Bush on the cheek and she’d be just like Joe Lieberman. Snort.

I have to assume that Clinton is equating “being a damnfool hawk on the Iraq War far too long” with being a strong commander-in-chief. And if that’s her game, she needs to be slammed down on this, hard.

See also John Aravosis.

Over the past few days there has been an ongoing flap regarding remarks about NAFTA allegedly made to the Canadian government by the Obama campaign. The story was that an Obama staffer had reassured the Canadians that Obama didn’t mean what he said about NAFTA. This story was pushed hard by the Clinton campaign even after the Canadian government denied it, andit may have played a role in Clinton’s recent win in Ohio.

Well, folks, guess what? The Globe and Mail says that it was the Clinton campaign that reassured the Canadians about NAFTA. The issue first came up in comments by PM Harper’s chief of staff, Ian Brodie.

At the end of an extended conversation, Mr. Brodie was asked about remarks aimed by the Democratic candidates at Ohio’s anti-NAFTA voters that carried serious economic implications for Canada.

Since 75 per cent of Canadian exports go to the U.S., Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton’s musings about reopening the North American free-trade pact had caused some concern.

Mr. Brodie downplayed those concerns.

“Quite a few people heard it,” said one source in the room.

“He said someone from (Hillary) Clinton’s campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . . That someone called us and told us not to worry.”

Government officials did not deny the conversation took place.

Mysteriously, the allegation about Clinton changed to an allegation about Obama somewhere between Ottawa and the CTV’s Washington Bureau.

Gracious, will Senator Clinton’s face turn maple leaf red?

The Clinton’s have been waving as “proof” a leaked memo written by a Canadian diplomat claiming that Obama economic adviser Austan Goulsbee had given reassurances about NAFTA during a conversation at the Canadian consulate in Chicago. The Obama campaign has said the diplomat misrepresented by Goulsbee said.

See also Steve Benen, Liza, Eric Kleefeld at TPM, publius, and Josh.

David Sirota has more on what he calls the “Clinton-Lieberman Connection“:

Confusion and misinformation are two of the most powerful weapons in a desperate politician’s arsenal. They were used by Joe Lieberman in the 2006 general election against Ned Lamont, and exit polls suggest that they helped Hillary Clinton blast her way through yesterday’s primary in Ohio.

Over the last few weeks, Clinton has been telling Ohio voters she never supported the North American Free Trade Agreement – an agreement that has become a symbol of corrupt economic policies to many working-class voters. Clinton has made these claims expecting everyone to forget her speeches over the last decade trumpeting NAFTA as a great success.

Her direct quotes praising NAFTA repeatedly are not up for interpretation – and neither are her absurd claims to “have been against NAFTA from the beginning.” We’re talking about pure, unadulterated lying here – and lying with a purpose: To confuse enough voters into thinking she actually did oppose NAFTA and that her strong support for NAFTA is somehow the same as Barack Obama’s longtime opposition to the pact.

Are you taking notes, Pennsylvania? Or are you going to be snookered the way Ohio was?

Pam of the House Blend says she is encountering increasing numbers of Clinton supporters who say they will not vote for Obama if he is the nominee. In fact, they plan to vote for McCain, she says. This is the reverse of a charge aimed at Obama supporters a few weeks ago — that we were “losers” who didn’t understand political reality and would not support Clinton if she were the nominee. Rich, huh?

At the Washington Post, Adele M. Stan objects to this column by Linda Hirshman. Stan writes,

Hirshman … makes her claims as a feminist, and then tars fellow feminists — those who vote differently than her — with the right’s “liberal elitist” brush. For flourish, she uses the sexist technique of ridiculing two women prominent in the Obama campaign by focusing only on their physical attributes. (Maria Shriver is reduced to a description of her hair, while Michelle Obama is mentioned in the context of her fashionable shoes.)

Feminists who support Obama, Hirshman writes, care little for the working-class woman. Their votes reflect nothing more than a “turn to solidarity with their own class.” The same goes for college-educated women of all stripes who support Obama, all of whom are presumed, in Hirshman’s argument, to be well-off, be they social workers or administrative assistants. If we cared for the working-class woman, she says, we would vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton because she was the first of the two to offer a paid family leave proposal and proposes a “slightly more generous” health plan than does Obama. If we vote on the basis of, say, something as esoteric as foreign policy, we’re being elitist, because presumably everybody knows that foreign policy has no bearing on the life of the working-class woman.

Um, whose children are being sent to Iraq, again?

I wonder about some of these “feminists” who insist we judge Senator Clinton as Prototype of All Women and not on her record or opinions or how she conducts herself. Being judged as individuals, on what we do instead of on our physical attributes, used to be the feminist ideal.

Also in WaPo, Ayelet Waldman writes,

I’m a longtime Barack Obama supporter, not because I’m a snob in thrall to his sex appeal, but because I’m heartily sick of candidates who preach populism while accepting donations from PACs and corporate lobbyists. Obama has amassed an astonishing war chest from over one million individual donors, many of whom gave small contributions. Clinton, meanwhile, held a “Rural Americans for Hillary” fundraiser at the offices of Troutman Sanders Public Affairs — the Washington lobbying firm that represents Monsanto. More like “Rural, Multinational Agribusiness for Hillary.”

There’s more; highly recommended reading.

Update: See also the BooMan, especially the second half of the post.

Update 2: Keith Olbermann is highlighting this.

Polls are saying that Senator Clinton is getting a late surge in voter support (with the help of Rush?) and could win the popular vote in Texas, although probably not the majority of delegates. She’s already favored to win Ohio and Rhode Island. If this turns out to be true, expect a long, nasty fight for the nomination that will damage both Dem candidates.

Contrary indicators: Just before the New Hampshire primary the pollsters said all the trends were moving toward Obama, which turned out not to be true. And the I Ching, which has been stubbornly ambivalent about the candidates for weeks, is now leaning a bit to Obama. My reading of the I Ching is that he’ll do Better Than Expected. However, both candidates will have cause for worry and regret and may be bitten by tigers. See also Michael Tomasky, “The Yeldarb effect.”

Whatever happens, I’m going to be on (workplace alert: don’t click unless your sound is on mute) Blog Talk Radio tomorrow from 1 to 2 pm eastern time, chatting about What It All Means. I’ll be out tonight until after 10 o’clock, but I’ll probably post something when I get home.

In the meantime, here’s some fun stuff to read:

H. D. S. Greenway, “Dancing on the Piano”

E.J. Dionne, “The Battle That Clinton Didn’t Expect”

And channeling Dylan Thomas:

HTML Mencken, “Rage, Rage Against The Undying of the Right”

Jonathan Chait, “The Clinton Campaign’s Dying Light”

Update: More —

RJ Eskow, “Comedians and Voters: Don’t Let The Press Bias Toward Hillary Throw You”

Nina Darnton, “Picking a President: A Feminist’s Right to Choose”

Michael Seitzman, “The Clinton Crystal Ball: What About Day Two?“

A neurologist named Robert Burton postulates that the sensation of certainty is entirely disconnected from actually knowing anything. He wrote in Salon:

… despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of “knowing what we know” arise out of primary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of rationality or reason. Feeling correct or certain isn’t a deliberate conclusion or conscious choice. It is a mental sensation that happens to us.

The importance of being aware that certainty has involuntary neurological roots cannot be overstated. If science can shame us into questioning the nature of conviction, we might develop some degree of tolerance and an increased willingness to consider alternative ideas — from opposing religious or scientific views to contrary opinions at the dinner table.

As I understand what Dr. Burton wrote, the sensation of certainty is generated in a sort of invisible field created by the neurons throughout the brain. The important point is that it not generated by those parts of the brain associated with cognition and reason. Certainty feels like a thought, but it isn’t.

I have a post up about this on the Buddhism blog, but here I want to relate it to politics.

Certainty as an involuntary sensation unrelated to actually knowing anything explains the Bush Administration, big time. But in recent weeks, as the activist Left and the Left Blogosphere have divvied up into Clinton and Obama camps, it’s broken out here in our neighborhood as well. I believe most of us, and I include myself, have allowed sensations of certainty to color our views of both candidates.

Let me make my case: My preference for Obama comes less from his oratory and more from his strengths as a campaigner and the fact that he’s bringing new people, especially young people, into politics. I doubt that he can heal the nation’s sick political culture by himself, but an overwhelming tide of public opinion might do the trick. And I think a lot of the young folks get this better than some of us geezers do.

I second what E.J. Dionne said about historic opportunity:

During the past two months, Democrats in large numbers have reached the same conclusion that so many Republicans did in 1980: Now is the time to go for broke, to challenge not only the ruling party but also the governing ideas of the previous political era and the political coalition that allowed them to dominate public life.

In those few places where he and Senator Clinton disagree, I actually have a slight preference for her positions over his. I’ve voted for her both times she’s run for U.S. Senator, and I met her once and thought she was charming.

But she has a long history of betraying progressive interests for her own political interests, and her strengths lie less in shaking up the system than in finessing it, sort of. Her claims of being ready to lead on “day one” have been belied by the fact that her campaign is a mess, and it’s a mess largely of her own making. She listens to the wrong people; she’s been slow to replace incompetent staff; she often seems tone deaf to public mood. Further, I think her resume is way too padded and her senatorial legislative accomplishments are way too thin. She fights and fights, yes, but she doesn’t win much.

Now, those are reasons. But I know that underneath those reasons is a strong sensation of certainty that I really, really do not what Senator Clinton to be the nominee. I’ve had this sensation of certainty since the last presidential election, when the bobbleheads began to talk up Hillary as the sure-fire Democratic nominee in 2008. A big part of that sensation came from her Iraq War resolution vote and her early support for the Iraq War. She was one of the most hawkish Dems in the Senate for a long time after the 2002 vote. When we really needed her, she let us down.

But I know another part of it is long-smoldering resentment for the Clinton Triangulation Strategy, in which both Bill and Hillary often dissed the Left to mess with the Right. And the whole “inevitability” narrative really burned me. Since early 2005, if not sooner, Chris Matthews et al. have been chirping at us that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee. Like us little citizen-persons had nothing to say about it.

So that’s my confession. Now I’d like to see some equal-time soul-searching on the part of Clinton supporters.

There are solid and sensible reasons to prefer Clinton to Obama. But I rarely see those reasons. Instead, what we get from Clinton supporters increasingly borders on psychasthenia. (I would have used the more common word, hysteria, but one rabid little Clintonista has declared war on me for being a sexist and anti-feminist because I used it elsewhere. Well, thanks for the traffic, toots, but you don’t get a return link.)

I’m not going to catalog all of the wild conclusions about Obama to which Clinton supporters have jumped, but Lance Mannion does a good job of answering some of them.

IMO the biggest reason the Right is mostly still pulling its punches regarding Obama is that the Clinton supporters are doing their work for them. (I’d send you to some links, but I’ve got enough of ’em pissed off at me already and I don’t want to start a blog war. If you hang out much in the blogs, you probably know who I’m talking about.) They’re frantically throwing every bit of mud at Obama they can find, oblivious to the fact that they’re doing to Obama what the Right did to the Clintons all those years — unquestioningly believing everything bad they hear, jumping to conclusions that may or may not connect, and blowing it up into a Big Deal. Sure, some accusations contain some facts, but so did most of what the Right said about the Clintons. And if anyone really wanted to do it, enough facts could be dug up about Senator Clinton to generate new smears to tarnish her just as robustly.

They’re right that Clinton has gotten worse press — lately. She wouldn’t have been a candidate at all, however, had the media not built her up into Miss Inevitability for so long.

Clinton supporters have a strong sensation of certainty that Hillary Clinton should be the nominee, as do I that she shouldn’t. The difference between us is that I admit I’m listening to my guts. Few Clinton supporters I’ve run into are able to be that self-honest. There really is a vibe coming out of many of them that Senator Clinton was entitled to the nomination, and who is this Obama upstart to take it away from her?

Jennifer Nix has a good column at Huffington Post, in which she accuses the Clinton campaign of magical thinking:

This reasoning is pinned at present on diaphanous evidence, threatened lawsuits and some audacious fear-mongering. It is rooted in the Clinton campaign’s emotional investment in a host of great expectations–to finish what Clinton started on the health care front in the 90s, to restore the Clinton legacy, and to elect the first woman president in U.S. history– ideas which have lost their luster in the Democratic, and perhaps American psyche, since those golden days of inevitability.

As Joan Didion wrote in her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, about her mental and emotional state after her husband’s sudden death, this kind of thinking can set in when grief is too great to bear, and one cannot deal with the reality of death. “I had entered at the moment it happened a kind of shock in which the only thought I allowed myself was that there must be certain things I needed to do.”

With Clinton’s inevitability turned to dust and her losses in eleven straight contests pointing to the likely end of her campaign, the candidate and her staffers are busying themselves with ominous tasks to fend off the shock.

The question is: At what cost to the rest of the Democratic party, and the nation?

It’s a good column, and I suggest you read all of it.

Tomorrow is primary day for Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island. Latest polls say that Senator Clinton will almost certainly win Ohio and Rhode Island. Obama is ahead in Vermont, and Texas is dead even.

I understand it’s close to mathematically impossible for Clinton to suprass Obama in elected delegates. But if Clinton wins Ohio and Rhode Island, she’s going to fight on, no matter the actual delegate count and no matter what she’s doing to the party. If she wins Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas, there’s a chance she’ll get her way and force the party and superdelegates to give her the nomination.

I have a strong sensation of certainty that this would be a huge mistake.

Update: Rush is urging Texas Republicans to vote for Clinton. Make of this what you will.

Update 2: John Aravosis:

Hillary’s campaign has already said that they are throwing the kitchen sink at Obama. They will discuss, are discussing, all the bad things that the GOP will throw at Obama in the fall.

So, what will the Republicans throw at Hillary in the fall?

Lots. But I’m not going to detail those things today because I’m, surprisingly, still pulling punches with regards to what I write about Hillary. I don’t want to damage Hillary should she become our nominee, as increasingly unlikely as that appears. I don’t want to write about very real scandals in Hillary’s past, scandals that we will be forced to revisit for the next 8 months, and 8 years. I don’t want to write about the rumors about Bill that no one has written about to date, even though the rumors include lots of details which are at least just as true as Obama being a Muslim. While Hillary’s campaign is pushing known lies about Obama, such as the “Muslim” connection, most of the stories about Hillary are anything but lies. They’re real stories that she will have to discuss publicly, again and again and again, to her and our party’s detriment.

But I’m not going to be discussing the details of those stories today because I don’t want to make our candidate damaged goods in the fall. You will notice that neither Obama’s campaign nor Obama’s official, or unofficial, surrogates are talking about the Clintons’ past or present scandals, the Clintons’ negatives, what a Clinton run for the presidency will to Democratic congressional races and governor races across the country. The Clintons are counting on the fact that none of us will write about their negatives, because we’re too nice. So they can get as dirty as they want, with impunity.

Well, come Wednesday, if Hillary doesn’t win 65% of the delegates in Ohio and Texas, and still insists on staying in the race and ripping our party in two, it will be time to start treating candidate Clinton with the same golden rule she is using for candidate Obama. Why? Not for revenge, but for the sake of our party and the fall election. Hillary and her campaign are in the process of turning Obama into damaged goods in the fall. They didn’t have to go there, but beating Obama became more important to them than beating John McCain. So, the first question for Hillary come Wednesday, should she decide to continue risking our chances of winning in the fall even though the math says it’s over, will be the question she’s asking Obama today: What negatives will the Republicans throw against you in the fall? And as I’ve noted repeatedly, there are some negatives out there that most of you don’t even know about – but everyone in Washington knows about them, in detail. That’s because even Democrats who don’t love Hillary, don’t go there, for the good of the party. On Wednesday, the good of the party may dictate that we do.