Barack Rebounds

My Obama depression of the last week or so has finally started to fade. Don't get me wrong -- I'm still worried about what kind of bullshit Senator Clinton is gonna throw at Barack, but that particular form of anxiety has been with me since last November and will probably stick around till Obama accepts the nomination (knock on wood!) and announces HRC will not - repeat NOT - be his running mate (pound the shit out of a big block of wood).

As many media outlets have confirmed (but see especially slate.com's mini-essay on the subject), Obama's significant victories in Wyoming and Mississippi, along with the recently semi-released results of the Texas evening caucuses, combine to erase any delegate gains HRC made on March 4th, with Obama probably even a small handful of delegates better off (relatively speaking) than he was vis-a-vis the junior senator from New York on March 3rd. Or as David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, recently put it in an email to supporters: "With our overwhelming victory in the Mississippi primary yesterday, our lead in earned delegates is now wider than it was on March 3rd, before the contests in Ohio and Texas."

That's good. Of course, politics can still be played and stories will be spun. That same email from Plouffe has a good summary of the current arguments being advanced by Team Clinton, while also putting them in historical perspective (e.g., the history of this campaign) in a pithy way:

"When we won Iowa, the Clinton campaign said it's not the number of states you win, it's "a contest for delegates."
When we won a significant lead in delegates, they said it's really about which states you win.
When we won South Carolina, they discounted the votes of African-Americans.
When we won predominantly white, rural states like Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska, they said those didn't count because they won't be competitive in the general election.
When we won in Washington State, Wisconsin, and Missouri -- general election battlegrounds where polls show Barack is a stronger candidate against John McCain -- the Clinton campaign attacked those voters as "latte-sipping" elitists.
And now that we've won more than twice as many states, the Clinton spin is that only certain states really count. "

At the end of the day (this day or any other between early January and now), Obama's won more states, more delegates, and more votes. Hopefully, HOPEfully, that'll actually mean something when the super-delegates eventually end up doing their thing. We shall see.