A guarenteed bloc of supporters?

You mean, 17-64 year olds?

You know, the demographic that Obama won by 61% in Indiana and 74% in NC?

and just because you and prominent others keep repeating does not make it true.

Now, President Bill Clinton, in a WHYY interview, made that same claim, "that the race card was played on him."

That makes it very difficult for me to refute it given the words of an ex-President, however counter factual and irresponsible they were. (He now claims he did not say that, even though it is on tape!)  Here's a couple things:

a) Hillary Clinton had the lead among African American voters all through 2007.

b) I've done extensive GOTV in African American communities and met many voters who were Clinton supporters and did, and still do have, good feelings for the Clintons. The exit polls bear that out.

c) Barack Obama's 2007 campaign was about Unity and coming together to Make Change and it has kept that theme to this day. Obama's campaign was NEVER invested in divisive, race-based rhetoric...that kind of rhetoric hurt him more than it helped.

d) Barack Obama's win in Iowa among white voters created a massive change in perception of him in the black community.

e) Barack Obama's win in Iowa also created a fundamental change in strategy from the Clinton team (who finished third)

First, Clinton left the "Ready to Lead" slogan and moved towards talking about her ability to bring change which morphed into "Real Solutions"

Second, Bill and Hillary Clinton and their surrogates DID USE potentially racially divisive language (Mandela, "fairy tale", LBJ/MLK) over that weekend that prominent neutral African American Democrats objected to and perceived as unfair to Obama.

f) Chief among the neutral African American leaders who objected to this rhetoric was Jim Clyburn, House Whip and the leading Democrat in South Carolina.  In a New York Times interview printed on January 11th, Clyburn expressed his dislike of the perceived slights coming from the Clintons. Privately, Senator Kennedy made much the same argument to the Clintons.

g) Post New Hampshire there was also a flurry of reporting on race. Jesse Jackson Jr. made a stupid comment that was roundly condemned and...was not seen or heard much from again. A memo written by a South Carolina Obama staffer that was simply a list of press clippings of attacks on Obama was later opportunistically and counter-factually portrayed as "playing the race card" by Clinton partisans. (The memo does NO SUCH THING) Sen. Obama, despite the fact that the memo contained nothing BUT the press clippings, refuted and apologized for it at the Las Vegas debate and promised to move beyond that kind of rhetoric. He and his campaign have kept that promise.

h) The Clinton campaign, headed into South Carolina, conducted a hard fought but increasingly less successful campaign to win African American votes. (Bill's listening tour of L.A. churches, HRC and WJC visiting churches in South Carolina.)  However, those two factors: One, sincere African American support that swung to Obama after Iowa.  Two, the Clinton campaign's increasingly hard ball and hard edged demographic campaigning in South Carolina led to a situation that Bill Clinton's comment, the day of the South Carolina primary using "Jesse Jackson" to characterize Obama's win there was perceived as an EXAMPLE of the very attitude that Jim Clyburn and Ed Kennedy had warned him about. (In point of fact, Obama ran strongly with young white South Carolinians against BOTH Clinton and Edwards)

That "Jesse Jackson" clip of Bill Clinton was first featured on TPM and was roundly perceived and reported as a racially tinged slight.

i) Since that time HRC has won a smaller and smaller share of the African American vote. While she did appear at the Tavis Smiley summit in Louisiana, Clinton's campaign has tended to run, more and more, towards events where there are fewer and fewer African Americans around to attend...ie. whiter and whiter areas. (though Clinton still does draw racially diverse crowds when she appears in cities) Bill Clinton, in particular, has been seen as an ambassador to small town America which in most states is largely white.

That has not helped win over Af-Am voters. And it's easy to see why.

Inevitably, hard fought campaigning will cause people to take sides. Seniors have stuck with Clinton, but Obama does make inroads with middle aged white women and men in some states, and with some rural voters West of the Mississippi and the African American rural South.

Young voters have, in OH and PA, given more votes to Clinton, but African Americans have over the course of this campaign have not.

The question is not the counter-factual distraction of "race card" it's whether, given the enormous pull towards Obama post-Iowa, what did Hillary Clinton do to reach out win back even a percentage of the African American vote?

That vote, in my experience, is not monolithically opposed to Clinton.  (Though opinions about her divisive tactics have hardened somewhat.) In fact, in my canvassing, questions about a Unity Ticket among African American voters ranked as the number one question voters had.

If Bill and Hillary Clinton had run a different campaign and she had won 20% of the AF-Am vote, this would be a much different nomination cycle.

However, as an Obama supporter, I am also convinced that if Obama had been able to continue to make the Unity/Change argument that won him Iowa, without some of the divisive and demographically targeted negative campaigning of the Clinton side, it would have been a different nomination cycle as well.

The key change, however, was the the change in African American support for Obama and Clinton strategy post-Iowa. Everything else flows from that.

That's not "playing the race card" which DID NOT happen. That's American history.

I think Obama would've eventually ended up with the black vote by healthy margins, no matter what either campaign said.  Maybe not 9/10, but 75%+.  

That said, you can't win the nomination with just the black vote.  It certainly helps, but it, alone, isn't nearly enough.

Obama has got nothing TO close. He's not running as a Democratic candidate for the White House in November (as HIllary is). He's just running for the nomination. Axelrod and Brazile are already writing off the traditional Dem blue-collar base. Obama's got nothing but icing, no cake under it. He's got latte liberals, students, "Dems for a Day". The only solid bloc he's got is AA (mostly in red states that can provide delegates but not electoral votes). Wright has lost him the Inds and GOP who may have sincerely supported him, and bitter/cling has lost him Dean's guys in their pickup trucks.

Obama and some leisured guys figured out a way to game the system: collect some empty delegates from states so red that no one goes to the caucuses except the students and latte liberals. Disenfranchise two big states that weren't going to support him (Brazile in the DNC, plus Obama taking his own name off the ballot in MI and then sabotaging all attempts at re-votes.)

He's also got the Corporate Media Talking Heads, but the real Dem base voters have better things to do with their weekends.

Hillary has been bringing out the real base in prep for November, getting the big swing states lined up -- which Obama has not been able to win. Dem base is ignoring him or laughing at his 37.

Knowldegeable Superdelegates who care about winning in November know where Obama's delegates and votes have come from, and just how non-indicative they are of November votes. And those Supers aren't scared of being told they're violating some rule that Obama tried to invent in the middle of the game: they know their job is to pick a winner, not rubberstamp any kind of gameable metric such a 'delegate lead' or even 'popular vote.'

(Plus which, everyone knows Obama is young enough to serve later when he's more experienced, but this may be our only chance to get Billary's service again.)

There are certainly plenty of important states he won. Personally I think all the states have importance, and that is it a bit of a fallacy to think he would not win several states in the GE Clinton won in the primary. they are different races against different people, there is not a lot of overlap all things considered... that is one of the major weakness to the EV argument

1976. No frontrunner of Clinton's statute.
      
1992. Nobody wanted to run against Bush, someone who, at the time had 80%+ approval ratings.
      
2004. Dean/Kerry - No frontrunner.  So many were vying to take on Bush that nobody had the entire establishment behind them.

You can say that when all the voting is done.

He's beating Bill Clinton? That is an amazing accomplishment (especially since it requires time travel).

I wouldn't want 50 SDs in one day anyway.  I dont want voters thinking that the SDs stepped in and prevented them from voting...which is the spin that's going to come out of the Clinton campaign anyway.

It's going to go on until June. Another month before things are done.

This is a pretty strange comment, I think. So it's really your opinion that Obama would fare equally well against Clinton or, say, Gravel, at this point in the race? Against Paul, or Thompson, as against McCain? Or, switching eras, Obama vs. Mondale would look just like Obama vs Clinton?

Really?

No credit at all to Clinton being a great candidate? She deserves no credit for appealing to a lot of voters and doing an effective job of staying in the race? It's all Obama, nothing else, and none of his "weaknesses" are because of her strengths? None?

And do you assume the same logic in reverse, and figure it's entirely her problem that she can't win with college students, African-Americans, or people under 65? That's just blaming the opposition, right, and really it's just that Clinton only appeals to uneducated older white folks?

Seriously. Credit where credit is due (in this case, to Clinton). It reflects better on your own candidate.

Haha WOW.  I try to give credit to Clinton being a great candidate (I think I used the word 'historic') and you tell me that I'm trying to look for something supporting Obama.

Buddy, face it.  She was the front-runner with the establishment behind her in 2007, $100+ and leads in a majority of the states.  The fact that Obama was able to come this far and still lead by a healthy margin is something.

Give credit where it is due.