With a Surge, Obama Makes His Case
By
ADAM NAGOURNEY Published: February 13, 2008
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WASHINGTON — The lopsided nature of Senator
Barack Obama’s parade of victories on Tuesday gives him an opening to make the case that Democratic voters have broken in his favor and that the party should coalesce around his candidacy.
Mr. Obama’s victories capped a week in which he went undefeated in states across the country, in many cases by big margins, over Senator
Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
And his strength on Tuesday sliced across nearly every major demographic line, with two elements standing out: in Virginia and Maryland, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls, he beat Mrs. Clinton among women and the two were nearly even among white voters.
The sheer consistency of Mr. Obama’s victories over the last few days certainly suggests that many Democratic voters have gotten past whatever reservations they might have had about his electability or his qualifications to be president.
Even before his latest victories, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, had whittled away at the advantages amassed last year by Mrs. Clinton.
He now enjoys a big financial advantage. Her big lead in national polls is gone. By most counts, Mr. Obama can now claim more delegates pledged to him. He has won far more states than Mrs. Clinton, although she won some of the big prizes, like California and New Jersey.
For weeks, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama had approached this race the same way: as state-by-state trench warfare, in the belief that the nomination would go to whoever got the most delegates.
But the results in the past week suggest that the race might be tilting back to a more normal form, where the goal is achieving a series of splashing victories and thus momentum. They have provided Mr. Obama with the opportunity — which he has been taking and plans to seize in a more full-throated way starting on Wednesday — to argue that voters across a wide cross-section are lining up behind his candidacy, and that the time has come for the group that could hold the balance of power, those 796 unpledged superdelegates — party leaders and elected officials who have an automatic seat at the national convention — to follow suit.
“We are in a momentum phase of the process now,” said Tad Devine, a Democratic consultant.
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers dispute that, noting that his victories have come in relatively small states and that she has invested most of her attention in two big contests coming up on March 4: Ohio and Texas. And her aides have long argued that by the end of the voting, the difference between the two candidates in delegate count would be minimal, leaving the final decision to superdelegates, who in their view would favor Mrs. Clinton.
But if party leaders interpret the number and the magnitude of Mr. Obama’s victories as Democratic voters’ having made up their minds in his favor, that could have big consequences for Mrs. Clinton.
For one thing, if this is an election where a candidate wins by virtue of being seen as winning — a definition of momentum — that would mean that voters in coming states would be influenced by the outcome of earlier races. If that is the case, Mr. Obama might be in a position to encroach on Texas and Ohio, which have become Mrs. Clinton’s fire wall.
For another, fund-raisers and superdelegates are, by their nature, people who tend to go with someone who appears to be a winner, and to do it fast.
Perhaps most problematically, the delegate selection process — in which delegates are allocated to the candidates in proportion to how many votes they win — could now begin to work against Mrs. Clinton. Both candidates get a share of the delegates, even if one wins by a margin of 20 points — which is one reason Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama had stayed so close on delegates.
But many of Mr. Obama’s victories since Feb. 5 have been big enough that he was rewarded a larger number of delegates, meaning that he could have a significant advantage starting Wednesday. The problem for Mrs. Clinton is that in order to make up that difference, she may find that she not only has to win Ohio and Texas, but win them by margins large enough to close a pending delegate gap.
But whatever challenges Mrs. Clinton faces, she has repeatedly proved to be a resourceful candidate with a sharp campaign organization and a passionate base of supporters. Should she win in Ohio and Texas, she could halt Mr. Obama’s claim to momentum and keep the race for pledged delegates from breaking against her. And there has been a history in this campaign of Mr. Obama winning, only to have Mrs. Clinton return and win.
“You can’t make a judgment until Ohio and Texas,” said Jonathan Prince, who was a senior adviser to
John Edwards of North Carolina, who quit the race two weeks ago. “In this campaign, every time he has surged ahead, voters take a pause. If momentum keeps slamming into a wall, than you do have to come down to the numbers.”
Mike DuHaime, a Republican consultant who managed Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign, said Mrs. Clinton was making the right decisions in trying to make the most of her strengths.
“Clearly, she has had success in larger states and there are a whole bunch of delegates at stake on March 4,” Mr. DuHaime said. “They are not trying to figure out who can win the most states; they are trying to figure out who can win the most delegates.”
Still, in the end, those two things are not unrelated. Mrs. Clinton has decided to in effect cede the contest in Wisconsin next Tuesday, meaning it may be two weeks after that before she has a potential to put herself in a favorable light again.
At a time when Mr. Obama will be announcing that his train is leaving the station — and pointing to the relatively clear field that Senator
John McCain of Arizona has on the Republican side in urging Democrats to unite behind him — that could prove to be an awfully long two weeks for the Clinton campaign.
araphrase: "i dont seek the presidency due to my view as being the chosen one to rescue our country in its hour of need"
Obamicans are definitely welcome here.
