1.  That Obama won all of the primaries and caucuses over the weekend wasn’t particularly surprising.  What was surprising to me was the overwhelming margin of victory in each contest.  The closest race – Maine – was a 17-point Obama win.  What’s really weird about this is that almost all of the individual state races have been blowouts – on both sides.  While Obama and Clinton are neck-and-neck in terms of both the total popular vote and number of pledged delegates, none of the state races – with a couple of exceptions (Missouri, New Mexico and Connecticut come to mind) – has been close.  Clinton won big in California, New Jersey, Tennessee, Oklahoma, etc.  Obama won by landslides in Washington, South Carolina, Kansas, Georgia, Minnesota, etc.  I’m really not sure what to make of this trend.  The country is evenly divided between the two candidates, but intrastate voters don’t seem to be… at least not to the same degree. 

2.  Lanny Davis – a longtime Clinton insider – was on MSNBC this morning, and a couple of his comments caught my attention. The first is that Clinton fully expects to lose on Tuesday in Virginia, Maryland and D.C., and that she isn’t really competing there.  The Clinton strategy now seems downright Guiliani-ish: skip everything until you find a state you like.  (In this case, Ohio and Texas, on March 4.)  Whether this works remains to be seen, but I thought it was pretty striking that Clinton – the candidate of inevitability; the presumptive nominee, someone with 100% name recognition – is now conceding states to Obama and hoping for a firewall.   

3.  The second Davis comment that I found striking came during the course of his spin on the greatness of Clinton’s candidacy.  In comparing her supporters to Obama’s, Davis noted that Clinton has assembled the “FDR coalition” of blue collar workers, women, senior citizens and Hispanics.  Nothing wrong with that, of course, and it’s certainly true.  But what is interesting is that Clinton has been trying to wrestle the mantle of “change” from Obama, to portray herself as new and fresh and historic.  Running as the candidate of a 1930s New Deal coalition hardly seems the way to do that.   

4.  Lastly, Paul Krugman has a really bad piece in the New York Times today – entitled “Hate Springs Eternal” – in which he suggests that Obama’s supporters are irrational, delusional and full of hatred and venom.  Yep, all those millions of new voters that Obama has brought into the Democratic Party – and into politics, generally – are really a bunch of hateful, divisive hero-worshippers.  Krugman even writes that the “Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.”  Memo to Dr. Krugman: it’s about the message, sir, not the messenger.  It’s “Yes We Can,” not “yes he can” or “yes she can” or “yes I can.”  The underlying theme of this ridiculously trite and infuriating column was that Obama’s supporters (who are all a bunch of Clinton-haters, apparently) need to show party loyalty.  Krugman is certainly entitled to make that argument, but it is one with which I fundamentally disagree.  More on that later, but suffice to say, I resent anyone telling me that I have to vote for a particular candidate – whomever that might be – simply because of party affiliation.