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Primary Talk

While it's hard to track public opinion shifts sans polls, Michael Sean Winters at America: The National Catholic Weekly has a glimpse of the talk among elite Democratic Washington:

I went to dinner with three friends last night in Bethesda, just outside Washington. We began talking about the Democratic primaries and about how disgusted we were with the Clintons' campaign tactics, especially Bill Clinton's dismissive equation of Obama's South Carolina victory with Jesse Jackson's wins there in 1984 and 1988.

...

Then something funny happened. A woman at an adjoining table leaned over and said, "I couldn't help overhearing your conversation. I was backing Hillary until last week but now I am with Obama. My daughter is in college in California and she is voting for Obama. We all are voting for Obama." She and her husband joined our conversation for about five minutes, before the arrival of entrees required their attention. Then, a woman on the other side of our table got up to leave. She was an older woman, perhaps in her early 60s. She leaned over and said, "I won't even vote for her in November now. And, I used to work for the Clintons! Make sure you contact all your friends to make sure they vote for Obama."

Winters then wonders if these sentiments, voiced at a ritzy-schmitzy DC restaurant, reflect a shift in media perception that might affect coverage of Clinton over the next few days. Personally, I'm more curious about whether there are conversations like this at restaurants and dinner tables across the country right now.

--Barron YoungSmith