‘Slogging up to Calvary’

On Tuesday night, CNN’s Jeff Toobin got it right. The result of Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary, Toobin opined, was for the Democrats “the worst of all possible worlds”: an expected Hillary win, big enough to energize her going forward (indeed, the cash-strapped Clinton campaign soon announced it had raked in $10 million in the 24 hours after Pennsylvania), yet nowhere big enough to give her a chance of overtaking Obama in either the delegate count or the popular vote.

Last Sunday, this column estimated Tuesday’s break-even or ‘default’ result as a Hillary 10-point win—her margin of victory in Ohio. She won by 9.

The expectations’ game was important, given that all the Clinton campaign really had going for it was spin. (Granted, it’s been spin with the enthusiastic connivance of the US television media. On successive broadcast days, eg, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews predicted a Hillary win “by 15 to 17 points,” and then downsized that to “10 points or upward,” before getting with the programme and calling 8 as the break-even point—just in time for him to announce on Tuesday night that Hillary had “exceeded expectations.”)…..