I received a ton of email in response to my column yesterday arguing that the Clinton campaign's biggest mistake was missing Obama's association with Reverend Wright, clues about which were available as early as February 2007.

Some readers suggested, plausibly, that the Clintons knew about Rev. Wright but chose not to push the story in advance of Iowa for fear that doing so would trigger massive blowback and alienate African-American voters in subsequent contests. (Given how African-Americans ended up voting in the primaries we can see that was also a mistaken assumption by the Clinton team).

Others suggested the Clinton campaign had shopped the story but couldn't get anyone in the media to run with it.

This morning, however, Michelle Cottle offers a bit of support to my argument with this anonymous quote from a member of the Clinton campaign staff on why they failed to beat Obama:

"Devastating vulnerabilities such as Obama's associations with Wright and Ayers were not unearthed by the campaign's vaunted research team in time to be fully taken advantage of--despite being readily available in the public domain."