What little difference a year makes. This week's Time magazine cover shows a smiling Obama, with the cover line: "And the Winner* is…" And, almost exactly a year ago, New York ran a similarly chipper Obama with the cover line "Winner*." Now the contexts for both stories were completely different — ours was about taking the lead in the fund-raising race, and Time's is, well, actually about Obama's being the winner of the primary. Still, looking back at our story, some themes look the same:

Alongside the aura of invincibility, the Clinton team projected something else [to fund-raisers]: a tacit message that it was time for big-dollar Democrats to choose between Obama and Hillary. On the bus or off the bus. No hedging allowed. And apostates would pay a price. For some in the party, the tactic struck a nerve. “It’s almost like a shakedown—you’re with us or you’re not,” Jim Neal, a North Carolina investment banker who was on an early conference call with McAuliffe, told the Times. “I find the squeeze, this early, to be quite vulgar … It’s a bullying tactic.”

Replace "fund-raisers" with "superdelegates" and you could have had that exact paragraph in a story last month. It's almost impossible to believe that we've been rethinking the same story lines for over a year now. In his Time piece, Klein rejoices that it's almost over: "A general-election campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama doesn't need any hype," he says. "It won't be boring." It's funny, we have no idea what boring is anymore.

Klein on Obama [Time]
Money Chooses Sides [NYM]