Did Hillary Clinton Just Finish Bernie Sanders Off?

Did Hillary Clinton Just Finish Bernie Sanders Off?

by Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/20/did-hillary-clinton-just-finish-bernie-sanders-off.html

"SNIP.............

Takeaway number 1 is the most obvious one. Clinton dodged a huge bullet with this win. Imagine the week of horrible, awful, relentlessly negative press she was in for if she’d lost this. No longer inevitable. Doesn’t have a lock on people of color. Sanders has a vision, all she has is I’m the electable one, and now she doesn’t even have that. People don’t seem to want her anymore. She could be toast.

It would have been brutal, and who knows, it might have created enough bounce in Sanders’s direction that he could have made it close in next Saturday’s contest in South Carolina, could have narrowed the gap considerably with African-American voters; Sanders could have endured a narrow South Carolina loss and charged on to Super Tuesday hoping to win not just the expected states (Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Vermont), but maybe a couple of surprising ones.

All that seems out of reach—for the moment. For the first time, Clinton has a little momentum. And yes, she was 25 points ahead in Nevada two months ago, but that was two months ago. The world changed. After Sanders’s thrashing of Clinton in New Hampshire, Nevada was up for grabs. It’s the first night the Clinton people can exhale.

Takeaway number 2 is interesting. It’s that Clinton may not now feel compelled to go heavy negative on Sanders, which means in turn that she should have an easier time of unifying the party as the nominee if and when that time comes.

................SNIP"