This Weekend's News

Strong showing for Obama yesterday in Washington, Nebraska, and Louisiana. His folks are hoping to edge out a win in Maine (a typically strong state for Hillary) to make the weekend a sweep.

Polls from Virginia and Maryland show Obama with 15 and 20 point leads, suggesting something miraculous (perhaps more tears) will have to emerge from the Clinton campaign to stem the tide going into "Chesapeake" or "Potomac" Tuesday on the 12th. Pundits have tended to assume Obama will clean up in the District of Columbia.

Assuming all of this happens, Ben Smith at Politico and others have begun speculating Obama might generate a substantial lead in delegates and momentum and be able to end this thing in early March. I am less convinced that a tidal wave like that will break out, but if it does, it might mean the Democratic Party can start organizing and coalescing by May or even April. What we do not want is to have McCain slowly building up his organization (and helplessly trying to hate abortion more or be less sane to appease his base) as Democrats fight this out through the summer.

Hillary has surprised everyone by raising $10 million from over 100,000 donors over the last week. This is impressive (though probably not as high as what Obama has brought in). It is perhaps in defiance of the conventional wisdom that she has amassed (seemingly overnight) a small-donor base. I would argue that this probably stemmed from the news she was broke and lending her campaign millions of her own dollars. Her grassroots folks (what few she has) probably assumed (and until now would have been correct) she had enough high-dollar donors to keep her machine going. Obama's small-dollar base will kick in more decisively over the next month or so, when her high-dollar donors will be useless and her campaign struggles to maintain a consistent donation plan from its small-donor supporters.

Maine's results come in this evening (voting ends by 6pm). Check The Page (Mark Halperin's great blog over at Time.com) for results.