Couldn’t Help But Notice (021208)

A prediction made here Sunday starts materializing:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her advisers increasingly believe that, after a series of losses, she has been boxed into a must-win position in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, and she has begun reassuring anxious donors and superdelegates that the nomination is not slipping away from her, aides said on Monday.

When you have to do this, it really is slipping away — and it could be a foregone conclusion by March 4.

Update: In its last pre-primary polls, ARG has Obama up up by 18 in both MD and VA primaries. RCP’s rolling averages have Obama up by 23 in MD and 18 in VA. A Poli Sci prof quoted here believes DC will go overwhelmingly to Obama, and there’s little doubt that he’s correct.

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I was in a medical lobby last week and saw something that, if I had known about it earlier, would have been tempted me to bet the ranch on the Patriots losing the Super Bowl.

It was the question on the cover of the September 17, 2007 issue of Sports Illustrated, “Is Tom Brady God?” asked by back page columnist Rick Reilly (link would require SI subscription).

Anytime you elevate a person in a team sport to best ever (or in Brady’s case, higher), you’re courting the fates. Ask the 1969 “Greatest College Football Team of All Time” Ohio State Buckeyes Buckeyes.

As to Brady’s supposed godlike status, Jessica Biel was not amused

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FactCheck.org notes some whoppers from the Democratic National Committee about John McCain:

The DNC plans “unlimited” spending against McCain; some of its claims are misleading.

The DNC paints McCain as favoring “endless war” in Iraq. What McCain actually said is that he wouldn’t mind a hundred-year troop presence “as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.”

It says McCain “looked the other way” rather than investigate Jack Abramoff and a Republican “Culture of Corruption.” In fact, McCain’s investigation led to a prison term for Abramoff and the downfall of several powerful Republicans. His investigators didn’t probe members of Congress directly, but that wasn’t the job of his Indian Affairs Committee. And in any case, federal prosecutors opposed a competing congressional investigation which might have interfered with their own efforts.

The DNC message makes criticisms of McCain that could be directed at its own leading candidates as well. It notes that he lacks training in economics, which is equally true of Clinton and Obama. And it accuses him of “staggering” reliance on lobbyists for campaign help, when Clinton also has substantial aid from lobbyists and Obama has some from former lobbyists.

It will be interesting to see, but I believe that the DNC and others attempting to shoot McCain down are going to find that he has a coat or two of Teflon that will deflect many lines of attack, especially ones as weak as those just noted. Ironically, the potential coats of Teflon are his war record and the public’s perception of him as a “maverick.” The latter is the very thing that has driven many talk radio hosts and conservatives to distraction, but that will, I believe, help him on balance.