Plus Obama was totally being propped up by the establishment! He was talked up a great deal after his 2004 speech and had support from prominent liberals like Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid etc. The idea that Hillary was viewed as inevitable in 08 is suuuper revisionist, and the argument that Obama was ever down in the delegate count to Hillary is just patently false.
Yes. When I say that there's a lot of revisionist history about the 2008 primary, there are really two big things in my mind. The first is that Clinton began with a seemingly insurmountable lead and was regarded as the inevitable nominee until late in the campaign. This is somewhat understandable because a big part of her campaign strategy was to position herself as the clear front runner, but the truth is she almost never broke 50% in the polls and fell behind Obama in most polls by February as the anti-Clinton vote coalesced around him.
The second big piece of revisionist history is that Obama was an outsider who came out of nowhere to win the nomination. While it is true that his rise was awfully fast, he still had good name recognition from giving the keynote address at the 2004 convention and was universally recognized as a rising star within the party. Clinton certainly started out with more establishment support, but Obama was still a mainstream Democrat who had a decent base of support within the party, especially in comparison to Sanders.
Frankly I see a fair amount of revisionist history or just plain historical ignorance when people talk about this primary. My first presidential election was 2004 so I was indeed well aware of the public opinion on marriage that shinra posted. Two years later I was living in Wisconsin when the voters approved a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage and even civil unions with over 59% of the vote (in a blue state during a Democratic wave election!). When people chastise Clinton for changing her position on marriage equality since 2004, they seem to forget that a lot of people, not just politicians, have also changed their views since then.
Similarly, even though I was too young to really be politically aware at the time, I know that crime was much higher in the early 90s than it was today, that many people (falsely, as it turned out) thought it was getting worse, and that a significant factor in Dukakis's defeat in 1988 was that Bush had successfully painted him as soft on crime (Willie Horton, "revolving door," etc.) That's not to say that one can't fairly criticize politicians for their positions at the time, just that so much of the discussion omits that context. People unfortunately are prone to viewing the past as though it were the present.