Having been crushed in 4 primaries tonight, the Clinton campaign has a new fall back position: Obama wins the small states, but Clinton wins the big states where everyone lives. Pat Buchannan was making that case on MSNBC all night, while Ambinder says something similar here.
Only as Matt Y points out, there's a problem with this:
This seems like a mighty gerrymandered "can't" for Obama. He can win Democratic states like Washington, Connecticut, and Delaware. He can win states the Democrats sometimes carry like Iowa and Missouri. Is the criticism that Obama can't win big heavily Democratic states? Well, he won his home state of Illinois and Clinton won her home state of New York. So this amounts to saying Obama lost California. Which, of course, he did. And it's a big state so California gets a lot of delegates. But one can hardly proclaim the winner of California the winner on some "states where the majority of Democrats reside" theory when Obama's winning more states and winning more delegates and winning them in all regions of the country.
There does seem to be a growing tendency by some commentators to use NY and CA as a sign of Clinton's strength in "big" states. Which, I suppose, would be fine if they also mentioned that NY was a gimmie or Clinton, and that when compared to Obama's gimmie in Illinois, her win wasn't really all that impressive. Moreover, Obama actually won the white vote in California, something which you would also think might be worth mentioning.
This "he can't win the big ones" meme is just wrong.
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