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 dogs sweater is not the right-tuned of green. I know, but it has that air that there should be reindeer or gambling across it. 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. That's because I'm going up to Harvard, so. Yeah. Getting in the spirit. Yeah. So anyway, now that everybody is to thrown 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

populace. 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 to start leading

towards some kind of finale. And the Clintons, in particular, Bill Clinton, have set up Texas and Ohio as, you know, the absolute firewall for Hillary. If she doesn't win them, she's out. So everyone's sort of beating the drum for next Tuesday. Speaking of beating the drum, if any of you actually hear a drum beating or a loud noise, It's not one of us that is expired.

It's that they're doing construction above the gap. You know, like the one thing we asked them is to not, I guess I gave them a different time. Yeah, unbelievably. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. It's an unbelievable. They've been asking them not to make so much noise and they seem to increase it by 15% of noise. I think this is very unfair. We have very nice building managers.

We made a lot of noise when we moved in, so it goes.

She's no picnic. David, your view on the... It's so freaking conciliatory. It doesn't do you any good to be nice to them. They're not listening. Who knows? Who knows? She's a Uniter. And I like them. You're a hopemonger. I like them, too. They're fine. You wrote an extremely nice email. Now you're exposing there. I like them. I like them. I'm irritated by the amount of work that goes on above my head all the time. And it's been going on a lot longer than ours did. I think that's the main difference between you and me.

Some of us show up at work. And then go off to give speeches.

We're going to retitle this, the ground to a screaming halt, Gab Fest. David, your view on the state of the Democratic race.

I don't think Emily's exactly right about this. I think the media has enjoyed, we've all enjoyed, the whole country has enjoyed this competition.

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