Dammit but we need someone to bite his lip and lie to us convincingly right now:

There’s nothing wrong with the American economy that can’t be fixed by what’s right with the American economy.

Bill Clinton is once again indulging in his ritually bitchy pre-election soundbite thing:

First America was “rolling the dice” with Obama.

Then Obama became “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”

Today, the Democratic party’s elder statesman is belittling Obama’s candidacy as nothing more than “smoke and mirrors.”

Whatever happened to the “brilliant, articulate, compelling vision embodied in Sen. Obama“?

(Excuse me for being late to this party; I was on a plane all day.)

It seems that the Clinton campaign has hit the cash skids. Top advisers are skipping a month’s pay, and she and Bill have tapped into their their personal post-presidential kitty for an initial loan of $5 million. Already, folks are speculating that loan could balloon much higher.
Obama’s campaign has wasted no time in using this Romneyesque move as a fundraising tool. And an effective one to boot. The campaign sent out an email seeking to raise $5 million today. They’re already at $5.2 million. Scratch that, since I started writing this post they’re already up to $5.5 million.

The campaign may just have hit that self-sustaining sweetspot so mythologized by Joe Trippi, wherein a movement campaign pulls in more money every day by dint of little more than momentum. Certainly, it doesn’t hurt that MoveOn is now raising funds for Obama too.
Bonus fun from via Ben Smith at Politico: In Iowa earlier this season, Bill Clinton said such self-financing by candidates “would clearly violate the spirit of campaign finance reform.”

Hillary is now appealing to donors to help her raise $3 million in three days. Gee, with that kind of cash, she could almost afford her pricey pollster pal Mark Penn.

Right Here.

Obama picked up a quarter of white voters an a phenomenal 80 percent of black voters.

• Won a majority of white folks under 30.
• Swept among every age group except senior citizens.
• Looks to take about 54 percent of the total vote
• Beat Clinton among women 53-30

From the looks of things it will be difficult for Edwards to catch Clinton for second, but he did win among Republicans.

70 percent of voters thought Hillary Clinton attacked Obama unfairly.

Bill Clinton’s campaigning seems to have backfired, with 48 percent of voters who called his role “important” in their decision-making pulling the lever for Obama. Compare that to just 38 percent who ended up voting for the former president’s wife.

UPDATE:

VIA TPM, more evidence of why Bill is less than helpful:

“Yes, she served on the board. And, yes, I think it was the right thing to do under the circumstances of the time, the 1980s.” –Bill Clinton today.

Anyone who thinks Barack Obama is a lock to win in South Carolina this weekend is fooling themselves.

This latest poll shows Obama with a sizeable lead — 27 to 20 percent — but also indicates that 36 percent of Democratic voters are undecided.

In Nevada, as in New Hampshire, the late deciders broke decidedly in Clinton’s favor.

All of which points to the fact that Obama camp is, once again, terribly mismanaging the expectations game. As they did in both New Hampshire and Nevada, they’re embracing the perception of front-runnerdom and doing nothing to guard themselves against defeat.

Look at what Clinton has done in each state: Essentially conceding defeat in the days before New Hampshire and Nevada. The tactic apparently has invigorated her supporters — Hillary needs me! — while at the same time both raising the stakes of a potential Obama defeat and buffering themselves against the possibility of a loss.

OK, maybe they really did believe they were going down in flames in New Hampshire. But in Nevada, despite late polls showing Clinton in first place, her camp predicted a five point loss to Obama. Obama did nothing to contest that expectation. So when she pops up with a six point victory it creates a perception of momentum out of what was really a status quo victory.

What’s curious is that even if Obama does win this Saturday, it does him no good to pose as if that were the foregone conclusion heading into the contest. Indeed, it minimizes any bounce he’s likely to get coming out of South Carolina.

Why not use the New Hampshire precedent to say the polls are phooey and that this is going to be a tight, tight contest? If he wins going away, he looks all the stronger.

As it stands, if Obama loses this weekend, he’s in deep trouble.

Given the uncontested expectations created by a combination of his consistent lead in the polls and Hillary not even campaigning in the state, I’m not sure a loss in the Palmetto State is a blow he can recover from.

Jake Tapper on anatomy of a smear.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the bitter exchanges that made this debate such a wild departure from the soporific roundtable in Nevada.

I want to pick up on Hillary Clinton’s positioning herself as the insurgent in this race.

Ever since Iowa, she’s been running as though she’s behind. That may have been true for about four days in between the first caucuses and the first primaries, but it is certainly no longer the case.

She won a tremendous victory in New Hampshire, a squeaker in Nevada, and her national lead, though narrowed, has remained just that, a lead.

Yet having suffered the slings and arrows and indignities of frontrunner-dom for the better part of a year, Clinton seems to have no interest in resuming the mantle.

Indeed, she seems to be relishing no longer being seen as queen of the hill.

It has allowed her and her surrogates to unleash myriad attacks, some of them substantive, most of them slimy, on Obama.

It’s really a neat bit of poll-position jujitsu, if you think about it — to be simultaneously in the lead and playing the underdog at the same time.

Obama fans should blame their candidate for letting her get away with it.

Certainly, a frontrunner doesn’t get away with the kind of mud that Clinton was slinging tonight. We heard from Hillary that Obama is a slumlord enriching Reagan lover who seeks to protect sex criminals and porno shops.

Her performance was angry and undignified, but it worked for her because both she and Obama have tacitly agreed to let the public see her as the feisty back-of-the-pack candidate whose not above fighting dirty to claw her way to the top…. of a mountain whose peak she never left.

This mind-trick worked wonders for her in Nevada, where, again, she fought with the kind of desperation that is only forgivable from one who is trying to topple a giant. And she’s got the same mojo working in South Carolina, where she’s now expected to lose.

It’s now to the point that if Obama underperforms on Saturday, he could be toast by February 5.