Chuck Todd, Genius

I don't mean "genius" sarcastically, only a little tongue-in-cheek because NBC News' Political Director Chuck Todd made remarks on the 6/8/08 edition of Meet The Press which I wish I had made, reflecting ideas I have had. Here is an example:

You know, the biggest myth of this campaign was that somehow the Clintons controlled the apparatus. They didn't. And, and, you know, I look back and I think that the, the two moments before the campaign even started were clues as to how difficult this was going to be for them. One was the election of Howard Dean as DNC chair, and the other was Democrats winning control of Congress in 2006 and the ascension of Nancy Pelosi as one of the leaders. Here they had two of the sort of three cogs of the Democratic leadership, in Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, who were waiting for there to be a crack in this inevitability armor of, of the Clintons. And once there was, it's as if they were just waiting. And it wouldn't have mattered if it was Barack Obama, Mark Warner, had he run, or John Edwards. Whoever ended up filling the vacuum of the anti-Clinton, they were going to rush to them. And I think that that's something the Clinton campaign never appreciated. I think they thought that it was sheer will they would get those superdelegates with them. They would get whatever rulings they needed, whatever primary calendar they wanted. But every step of the way, nothing went their way on process in the inside, and I think that shocks a lot of us today that they lost the inside game. It's one thing to lose the outside game, votes and all that stuff, but they lost the inside game.

To summarize: when Democrats won Congress in 2006, the locus of power in the party switched from the Clintons to Congress and the Democratic National Comittee. Once Mrs. Clinton lost somewhere- anywhere (in this case, Iowa)- she no longer was seen as inevitable and the hostility of the party establishment toward this couple began to bloom. The beneficiary would be the candidate who was not named "Clinton" and that happened to be Barack Obama, whom superdelegates then embraced as the individual who could rid them of the Clintons.

The final irony is that establishment's candidate was the individual running as the "change" candidate.