Since I jumped on the “Obama is going to win the nomination” bandwagon two weeks ago, I’m not going to backtrack now and say that he won’t, but it’s worth looking at how the Wisconsin results misled me to declare the contest virtually over.  Obama had struggled with downscale voters and many regular Democratic constituencies, and in Wisconsin the resistance to his candidacy among these voters seemed to melt away.  There were a couple things at work that I neglected before that tell me that I overestimated the importance of this: Wisconsin was to Obama what New Jersey or New Hampshire was to Clinton (i.e., neighbouring states where the candidate really had to do well), and in the same way that Iowa exaggerated Obama’s strengths in the eyes of the media Wisconsin seemed to show that Obama had started winning Clinton’s core voters.  But once he moved farther away from Illinois, however, he could not win those voters away from her and the old Mondale-Hart dynamic reasserted itself.   

The last week has been something of a disaster for the Obama campaign, and it has not really experienced a combination of gaffes, losses and blunders (plus coping with the Rezko trial) in quite this way before.  How the campaign recovers and handles the next week or two will tell us a great deal about whether he can regain his footing and still get the nomination.  Since the superdelegates seem all but certain to decide this, this is the time when he and his campaign have to show resilience or face three months of increasing anxiety about his electability.