Yesterday big news story was the bombshell NIE Iranian announcement that demonstrated once again that Bush is a bungling incompetent and/or liar. Predictably it received one or two diaries here while there must have been about fifteen anti Clinton diaries devoted to campaign trail trivia about alleged disgusting and shocking "attacks" or advanced euphoria about Obama poll movements of one or two percentage points. The latter mainly from correspondents that have been telling us for months that polls are meaningless. A favorite word around here.
Charlie Cook also published in the National Journal a useful and objective corrective to all this electoral ephemera in which he essentially said, and which I have long believed, that the results of the early races may not matter much particularly for Clinton given the scale of the leads enjoyed by both Clinton and Giuliani in all the later races. See latest Quinn numbers for FL,OH and PA. Now Cook is one of the most sensible and insightful commentators out there and he's usually not far of the mark although I will admit he could end up riding a bike around France next year. His views caused me to take a closer look at all the recent polls and then look back for about nine months. And guess what.
Obama, apart from IA,is stuck at around 24% which is where he's always been. Clinton has seen some slippage but it has not to any large extent gone to Obama.
RCP lists all the national and state polls and I checked all of the ones for the past 45 days with the exception of Zogby which has a self selected sample and is a bit of a joke. With the exception of the odd outlier here and there at state level not one of them outside of IA has him above 26% and most have him around 23%. As I say, Clinton has seen some slippage of the order of 7-10% which seems to have been the support she put on in late Summer when Gore dropped out. But it has not in the main gravitated to Obama. It has been split up in penny packets among the other candidates and if they falter it's almost certainly going to go home to Momma. If it was going to Obama it would have gone there in the first place when it got off the Clinton express. If you check pollsters trend lines they tell essentially the same story. Apart from IA he stuck in the low to mid twenties. This means that after 9 months of intensive campaigning during which he has become a national name Obama is exactly where he was when he started. This surely suggests that the Democratic electorate has largely made up it's mind about Obama and his core support is around 23% while Clintons is around 39% which is where she was before she got the Gore bounce and where she is now. Now the theory of the Obama fans is that a win in IA even a narrow one is going to transform the situation and magically going to add 15 to 20 points to his support but these numbers suggest that this is simply not a credible outcome.
As to IA situation the other thing that is being lost here is that 6-9 months ago Clinton wasn't given the remotest chance of winning IA. All the Obama/Edwards fans need to take a look at the polls back then when she was in the teens and all the debate was about whether she would come second or a poor third. Currently, the worst that seems likely to happen to her is a narrow defeat in second place which seems unlikely to have much impact elsewhere. Indeed it could be spun as a victory of sorts. And this is where Edwards comes in. She needs Edwards to be around for IA and to a lesser extent NH because if he is stealing votes from anyone he's stealing them from Obama. I do btw think this is much more of an "if" than is acknowledged here, but putting that on one side the fact that there are three players in IA helps her both in voting terms and in how a outcome could be spun in the event of a second place.
So Obama is stuck in the low to mid twenties. This diary is no doubt going to be greeted with howls of anguish, but go review the numbers, I'm not making this up. If it was any different I'd acknowledge it but it isn't. Check out Cook's article which makes entire sense to me. Try and cut through the daily he said/she said clutter, the loaded interpretations of so called experts in the media who all have agendas, and strategically she can't be beaten, certainly not by Obama, whatever Tweety tells you.