I'm a Hillary supporter, though not all that hostile to Obama. I fully expect to support Obama if he wins.

But what I am wondering about is this - what states, in a matchup with John McCain, does Obama win, relative to those that Gore and Kerry won? McCain ran relatively well in blue states, but New Hampshire is the only one I'd expect him to beat Obama in. What states do you think Obama picks off? Virginia? Florida? Colorado? If so, why?

I'm not being anti-Obama, I just want to know why his supporters think he's the better candidate.

1. John Edwards has substantial support. I don't really know if he has any reasonable path to the nomination, but his message is different from that of Hillary and Obama. People who care about that message deserve to have a say in the nominating process. I think people who knock Edwards for continuing in the race at this point are trying to deny those voters a voice.

2. Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, and their surrogates, are going to attack each other, pretty aggressively. We've never before seen a Presidential race where either a woman or a minority has a chance to win, and now we have both. We need to accept that, within reason, some attacks on Obama will have a certain degree of racial overtones, and some on Hillary will have a certain degree of gender overtones. That does not automatically make either hate speech. Politics is, in fact, a contact sport. We need to be able to look at those kind of attacks, and separate the trivial from the actually over-the-line.

I know a lot of people here are unhappy with the Democrats in Congress for various reasons, and I'm not going to say they are wrong. But I just wanted to highlight what I thought was the really important development of the week.

I was reading the article about Rahm Emmanuel in this month's GQ. He comes off as kind of a dick, though probably the kind of dick any successful national party needs a few of.

At any rate, the article inevitably focuses at least a bit on the 'schism' in the Democratic party, between the Clinton/Schumer/Rahm/Biden/Kerry etc side of the party (the big money corporatists) and the Dean side, which obviously also includes lots of Kossacks.

I don't have anything overly profound to say about which of these groups is right. But I do think that not enough attention has been paid to the fact that the Democratic victories in this cycle resulted from both groups being highly motivated, and their efforts, although not perfectly coordinated, complementing one another. The potential for the rift between the two to widen is one of the fault lines the Democrats need to be wary of over the next two years.

The cry of the GOP, oft-echoed by their sympathizers in the alledgedly liberal media, is that the Democrats only offer criticism, never solutions. This is partially true, but not entirely fair, either. The party is often divided on important questions like the war, but it's also true that minority status makes it often difficult, or strategically inadvisable, to put forth a coherent strategy.

However, as a few more months pass, and the elections come around, the party does need to make a forceful and positive statement of purpose. I hope to do my best to say what it should be.

So, Alito is Bush's new best friend. And the Democrats, who've been 'keeping their powder dry', are sounding willing to use it. Nothing wrong with that - I think most real Democrats would prefer (often very strongly) to not see Alito confirmed. So the question becomes - what is the likelihood that he can actually be blocked ? What would the political cost/benefit of blocking him, or going to the mat to try to block him and failing, really be ?

This is, of course, a partisan Democratic site. We all want the Democrats to do well, most of us harbour grudges about how Bill Clinton was treated, and we all keep an eye on what can lead to gains for the party. That often will color what we see when we look at the Plame case. There is nothing wrong with that.

But we should also strive to see what is objectively right, and to be the party that is on the side of that.

What I have seen - from Cheney, from Rove and Libby, from Bolton, etc - is that this administration has no respect for the line between the political and the careerist aspects of the federal government, and that they have sought to drive out of the government talented people whose only sin is disagreeing with the party line. I don't think this is something that has happened occasionally, but rather a systematic pattern throughout the administration. And it's worst with the CIA, because a carreer in the CIA is a difficult, demanding life, in an organization which cannot be effective if the administration is willing to sell its agents down the river for politcal gain.