On the state of the Democratic race.

TPM:

Let me stipulate to one thing: if this were two Republicans squabbling, I'd be laughing my head off at the moment. And I can assure you a lot of them are.

The Clinton campaign has gotten so deep inside the Obama campaign's collective head it just ain't funny -- or, depending on your political persuasion, it's very funny.

Late Tuesday night I wrote that the upshot of the March 4th contests was that Clinton had beaten Obama up a bit and he hadn't responded. She'd not only bloodied up his poll numbers a bit by throwing all sorts of stuff at him. She also showed that it wasn't at all clear that Obama was enough of a fighter to stand up to this stuff or get back in her face. More than the delegate numbers, that was the challenge March 4th had left him with.

But since then she's just been slapping this guy around like crazy. She's on the offense every day, dictating the terms of the discussion and getting results.

This "monster" thing is a good case in point. That's a pretty over-the-top thing for a key campaign advisor to say. But what it tells me more than that is that the Clinton campaign has these guys rattled really bad. Some of this is no doubt due to the fact that Power is a bit out of her element. She's more from the academic/policy world than the political/policy world. But, again, rattled. The Clinton folks have been bashing Obama like crazy. Now they follow up by explicitly demanding that Obama fire one of his key foreign policy advisors and ... how, long did it take? An hour? And she's gone.

If boxing is our metaphor she's got him cornered on the ropes on one side of the ring and she's just landing punch after punch. And all he can manage are the defensive moves that her constant attacks dictate.

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