It's the Hopemonger Gab Fest.

This is the Slate Political Gab Fest.

For Friday, February 29, 2008, I'm Dale Wilman.

On this week's agenda, the momentum continues to grow in the Democratic Party race,

Obama and McCain trade barbs, and

is stagflation on its way. And now to introduce the discussion, here's John.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest. I'm John Dickerson here, delightedly with David

Plotz and Emily Bazelon in the radio room at Slate for our weekly gathering. Emily. You know, with you and you're, because I just noticed you're wearing your Christmas sweater. And now with Emily's bright red shoes, it is like Christmas in here. It is. It really is. We should have a little, we should sing a little carol of some sort. But outdoors, it's 14 degrees.

I know, but it has that air if there should be reindeer or gambling across it.

There aren't.

I should note that David and I are both wearing turtlenecks, which is probably the first time that's ever happened.

David looks a little professorial today, actually.

He does.

He's about to go give a speech.

Yeah.

Getting in the spirit. So anyway, now that everybody is to throw their iPods into the river, after that brief discussion of our sartorial mistakes, Emily, tell us about your view about the state of the democratic race. Let me set it up for you. Barack Obama has all of the momentum in the world, including an endorsement recently from John Lewis, the civil rights leader and famous figure who switched his allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama. But if you look at the delegate count, the total delegate count, Barack Obama is only ahead by 50 delegates, which is a given the coverage he's gotten and the grand sweeping story behind him, it's actually a pretty small number, it seems to me.

It is a small number, and I think part of what's happening, I mean, he obviously, he's

won the last 11 contest, so there's that number.

But that number is really pretty meaningless because some of those states weren't

particularly populous. But it seems

to me what's happening is that the media, maybe people in general, were sort of ready for

this to be over. It's gone on for a long time. It kind of feels like the natural arc is ready

...