Commenter Nepat writes:

Hey, wait a minute. Did you copy and paste this post from last week? It’s deja vu all over again. Hillary wins again in Appalachia! Your point is clearly that Obama the Winner is a Big Loser in disguise….Kentucky made up its mind months ago. She’s been polling there at 62% for months. Hasn’t budged at all, really.

The point is, it should have budged, at least a little in his favor. It’s been the common opinion of political professionals for at least two weeks that he is the inevitable nominee. Newton’s political laws — the  laws of political gravity and political entropy — practically require that Democratic voters in Kentucky should have gravitated to him at least a little bit once his inevitability was assured. Instead, he has lost Kentucky by 35 points.

Obama is still going to win. And he is still a commanding favorite in November. But the simple fact of the matter is that he didn’t close the deal with his own party’s voters the way he should have, and that is primarily owing to mistakes he made and associations he could not escape. Which, in turn, suggests that the hazardous path to victory for McCain might be a little easier because his rival simply isn’t the political genius it looked like he might be at the beginning of the primary season.