Redstate

Every other political rally (not covered by C-SPAN) shows crowd shots.

Obama has had giant monster rallies with 15,000 fans, 18,000 fans, even as many as 30,000 fans.

Give him his due. His fans are enthusiastic, and they vote, and they are well organized over the Internet (something the GOP has only begun to do).

Assuming he's the Dem nominee, he will be a formidable candidate.

Tim Russert just called it for Obama.

Not Indiana - the whole thing.

They are saying the same things about her they said about Romney right before he dropped out - she'll have to do soul-searching, she's cancelled her morning appearances, etc. They also discussed who is going to have to break it to her that it's over, as Chris Matthews said, who goes out and takes the ball from the pitcher.

Remember, whatever y'all think of Russert, he is the center of the political punditry-conventional wisdom-media narrative complex.

Think this out...the DNC and especially the old libs are sitting completely befuddled right now wondering what the heck went wrong. There gal, Hil, cannot get a break. They like Obama's socialism and class warfare; they just don't know him and trust him. So the big electoral states couldn't give him the love. But here is my moment; my chance to shine...it is their gerrymandering that has done it to themselves. They have construed these screwy districts along "typical democratic" lines that they have grabbed the poor and or the poor black communities in Obama's victory states that were a shoe-in for Obama's line of "screw the rich I want to be fair".

I am laughing at how funny the karma of all this seems to me.

...Lean not on your own understanding...

McCain will win with 10 points even though he is an absolute ludite

if he's addressing a huge audience. Very clever.

Mary Katherine Ham is a terrific resource and her earnest and sweet persona is a welcome change from the Gorgons on the left or aggressive lawyers on the right on TV cable who pass for savantes & pundits.

The DNC has a certifiable committable lunatic at its helm---I expect some loud obnoxious noise from scream machine Dean any day now. Obama is full of class hatred---or rather his wife is a cauldron of seething anger over her low SATs! He's just sorta hen-pecked & it looks like she wears the pants in that duo.

They are going to pull out the class warfare on big corporate greed big-time and I'm afraid that McCain will start nodding in half-agreement. Not one of the three candidates has ever met a payroll or had any experience in the private sector---community organizing & lawyering don't count.

If it weren't for McCain's honorable service, I'd say a pox on all of them.

Zombie -- I know you are an Obama supporter. Not knocking you, but just a couple quick questions:

1) Are you uncomfortable with the fact that he has zero national security experience, in a post-9/11 world?

2) Do the anti-American comments by both his pastor and his wife (not to mention his own comments about "bitter" small-town Americans) at all bother you?

Thanks -- I didn't mean this to be confrontational.

I couldn't help but notice the complete lack of black faces behind him on the stage. This after he just received 90% of the black vote which made up 40% of primary voters. Who's kidding who here. The American people aren't that stupid...or maybe they are.

His weak spot are his connections to the middle east.

here in gomorrah (SF) and it was PACKED. The enthusiasm was something I had never seen. The people around me went INSANE when he came on stage. I was fairly undecided at the time at who I would support and I'm not sure if all of that energy turned me on or off, to tell you the truth.

I'm sure all of them play parlor tricks to make it seem like there are more people in venues that might otherwise look empty; that's why they hire those PR people. I remember a photo I saw in National Geographic a while ago where, for a Bush rally of some sort, they moved the stage forward and put gigantic curtains up to cover empty seats. They all do it.

Always book the candidate in a room one size smaller than the crowd you expect.

It's not how many people actually show up; it's how packed and intense the room feels.

Obama seems to have had about 3,000 people at the victory rally, which actually is a pretty big crowd for that sort of thing, but booking it in a huge venue and roping it down makes it look much smaller than it would have if you had had people rioting to get into the 1,000 person capacity ballroom at the local Hyatt hotel.

On the bigger issue, crowd enthusiasm and crowd size is not going to be Obama's Achilles heel. Even if he goes down like Kerry, he will still pull right up to the final day large enthusiastic crowds from that 30 percent of the general population that really, really like him. His issue will be sealing the deal with people who don't buy his extreme liberalism and who lose the story when he moves from uplifting rhetoric to poorly conceived policy proposals. I think, even with Bush being deservedly unpopular and the economy under stress, that there is a real chance for McCain to pull in enough of those voters in the key states to win on election day.

He has one heck of a Image Manager. Image is everything for this candiate. The problem with rock stars is that when they take off their make-up and get out of the lime-light, they don't look so good.