Will Scarlet writes in.

==

Saheli Datta links to a Matthew Yglesias post on Obama which starts off with "The fact that Obama's had this kinda sorta wrapped up since March 5". (Saheli is back to blogging again. Yay!).

It's a fundamentally bold, hopeful brand of politics. And I think it's no coincidence that that theme's been at the center of his campaign. Relative to Clinton, you see two people with similar policy agendas. But Clinton comes from a school of politics that says liberalism can't really win on the questions of war and peace, identity and authenticity, crime and punishment. It says that we live in a fundamentally conservative nation, and that the savvy progressive politician kind of burrows in and tries to make the best of a bad situation. It's an attitude very much borne of the brutally difficult experience of organizing for McGovern in Texas and running for governor in Arkansas at the height of Reaganism. Relative to McCain, Obama thinks it's possible to accomplish things in the world. He thinks the United States faces a lot of serious international challenges, but doesn't see them as primarily driven by menacing and implacable foes. Obama thinks that a combination of visionary leadership and shrewd bargaining can greatly improve our ability to tackle key priorities without any great expenditure of our resources.

All in all, the pessimist in me sees it as an approach to politics designed to set us up for a hard fall when it fails.

Arguably, Obama had it wrapped up as early as March because - all said and done - he has had the numbers since then. A"super-delegate candidate" would not, in my mind, have been terribly democratic in any case, and so in the end, the right candidate has been chosen.

I really hope that the Hillary supporters will end up swinging around to Obama. The failure of some of Obama's policies - as I suppose some of them inevitably will fail - will not nescessarily turn me into a pessimist about Obama. And surely, it is too early to count one's omelettes before the eggs have hatched and are broken. The question, to me, is still if the alternative is any better. Here is a graph with the employment numbers over the past 14 years, which sufficiently makes my point.