"The Audacity of Hopelessness"

Frank Rich is simply the best political writer in America. In this scorching NY Times column, he makes the case that the Obama campaign just worked harder and smarter than the Clinton campaign, and any other explanation is bogus. Below is a link and an excerpt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinion/24rich.html

The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.