obamatime

The mainstream media has today caught up with the reality of the race. That reality has been constant since Obama mathematically won the race in February.

It took a decisive win in North Carolina and holding his ground in Indiana to bring about this realization. In winning last night Obama triumphed over Hillary Clinton’s last minute pandering on the gas tax. It was ultimately the pander that sunk Hillary Clinton’s stock with the media.

I have argued that the gas tax pander would backfire on Clinton. Today it appears that is exactly what happened.

Here’s New York magazine on the impact of the pander:

There was a certain you-had-to-be-there quality to the homestretch of the Indiana Democratic primary. Through most of last week, national newspapers and cable pundits stayed fixated on the Jeremiah Wright imbroglio. But over the past week, the headlines in Indiana turned to the split between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the idea of a gas-tax “holiday.” So did the political ads flooding Hoosier airwaves. And the result was last night’s nasty surprise for Clinton.

It’s easy to see why Clinton was tempted to hop aboard the Pander Express, once John McCain floated the idea of suspending the federal gas tax of 18.4 cents a gallon for the summer. Giving some badly needed relief to truckers, farmers, and vacationers fit right in with the hash-slinger-in-a–Wal Mart–pantsuit image Hillary honed in Ohio, perfected in Pennsylvania, and was deploying all over Indiana. And when Obama derided the idea by saying it would only save consumers “pennies,” he seemed to be handing the Clintons one more opportunity to portray him as an out-of-touch elitist.

But as things turned out, when Hillary called for suspending the gas tax, she threw Obama the kind of rope he desperately had been seeking to pull himself out of the Wright train wreck. Wright screwed Obama as hard as any noncandidate has ever screwed an American presidential contender. And even after counterattacking and distancing himself from his former pastor, Obama was noticeably off his game. But the gas tax became a rare instance where Clinton and Obama directly and diametrically opposed each other on a policy issue, automatically generating headlines and coverage that helped push Wright out of the local news in Indiana.

Further, the gas tax turned the national media against Hillary over the weekend, because the Clinton campaign hadn’t bothered to line up (or just couldn’t find) a single expert to support suspending the tax. That left Clinton herself and surrogates like Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) insulting economists on national television, which looked ridiculous. It also left the media free to report the story without trying to be evenhanded and essentially to tell viewers that suspending the tax is a stupid idea.

Most importantly, the new debate let Obama rediscover his voice. He not only opposed the “holiday” on principle. In a way he hasn’t done on issues such as wearing a lapel flag pin, he also stated his objections loudly, pithily, and in keeping with the themes of his campaign. Liberal bloggers kept writing that Obama needed to argue that suspending the tax wouldn’t save drivers any money. Instead, he hammered away at it as a “gimmick” and a symptom of the Washington politics he says he wants to change.

…

Tragedy or poetic justice, Clinton went one pander too far in Indiana.

Remember. Gas tax. Gas tax. Gas tax.