I finally got around to watching this Barack Obama video. You can imagine Hillary Clinton and her supporters watching it and similarly stylish but substance free ads and hollering at their TV or computer screens, “Yes we can do what, darn it?” For Obama, the harsh but frank answer is, “We can get beyond the Clintons.” There is plenty of polling data to indicate that many Democrats want to, but the Democratic race won’t end tonight (in large measure, because the proportional voting system will keep the race in equilibrium). Unfortunately for Obama, that sylish excitement is hard to sustain for weeks and weeks.

One additional advantage which Clinton has: newspaper columnists do not make up a majority of Democratic primary voters. Whether it is David Brooks’s chilling account of her treatment of Congressman Jim Cooper, who had the temerity to suggest a non-mandated health-care plan in 1993, or E.J. Dionne‘s description of the Obama “revival,” this is Obama-rooting mainstream media coverage that would make John McCain envious. But Richard Cohen takes the prize with his description of the Bill problem:

He remains, as Wordsworth might put it, too much with us. He was a good president with bad associations — beginning with Jim McDougal of Whitewater fame and ending with Marc Rich of pardon infamy. Bill Clinton has a tropism for the faintly corrupt, and his wife has more than a tropism for him. He would stalk her presidency as he has her campaign, and when she vows that she alone would rule the White House, she is talking personnel, not marriage. It ain’t the same.

It’s enough to make you hope that “they can.”