Anybody who has ever stayed until quitting time at a gin mill knows the feeling. The crowd is thinning and the energy is sagging even before the bartender makes it official: Last call.Barack Obama doesn't strike me as a guy who spends much time in saloons, but he's probably starting to get that last call feeling. He has to know his presidential campaign is running out of time.
Sen. Hillary Clinton, she of the high negatives and polarizing personality, is pulling away from the Illinois rookie. Like water running downhill, she's filling all the cracks and crevices and leaving him no safe place to stand. The bigger her lead in the polls, the more gaffes he makes, which produces even bigger numbers for her. She has about a 20-point lead in national surveys, is now ahead in all the early states and has huge leads in delegate-rich Florida and California. Even Obama's wife, Michelle, is starting to show the strains, ominously warning an Iowa crowd that "The game of politics is to make you afraid, so that you don't think!"
Her point, presumably, was that voters should be afraid if her husband loses. Hmmm...
(Source: New York Daily News' liberal columnist, Michael Goodwin)
