News on Obama & Clinton in Wyoming and Today's Political Cartoon

Well Todays Political Cartoon is dealing with the current market trends and the concept of our Spending habits. I mean this cartoon doesn't even touch the fact that we are going to borrow the money for our next set of tax rebates from China. Hmmmm...Does that even make sense? Well This cartoon is at least funny. Now onto the real news.

With 96 percent of the precincts reporting, Obama had 59 percent to Clinton's 40 percent.

Democrats in Wyoming get little respect. The sparsely populated red state is home to just 218,000 thousand voters, most of them Republicans, like Wyoming's own Dick Cheney.

But this year, Clinton and Obama eagerly glad-handed voters across the state because even Wyoming -- with its 12 delegates -- counts.

Barack Obama won the Democratic caucuses today in Wyoming, a state the party's presidential candidates often overlook, but that in this nail-biter of a race saw heavy campaigning by both Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The excitement about the Democratic race was evident at the Teton County Caucus, held in Jackson. Originally scheduled for the Virginian motel, the caucus had to be moved to the larger Snow King Resort to accommodate the crowds that turned out.

In previous years, no more than 200 Democrats had ever turned out in Teton County, but this year Democratic State Committee chairwoman Lesley Peterson estimated the overflow crowd at 1000 or more by early evening.

The high turnout among Wyoming Democrats is more evidence of how tight the race is between Clinton and Obama nationwide.

A Newsweek poll released Friday found the rival candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in a statistical dead heat, with 45 percent of registered Democrats and Democratic leanings favoring Obama, and 44 percent favoring Clinton.

That marks the latest pendulum swing in a race that last year saw Clinton as the all-but-inevitable Democratic candidate, to Obama's decisive lead during a sweep of February primary states. The poll was based on telephone interviews with 1,215 registered voters March 5-6.

The Newsweek poll also shows neither candidate has an edge when it comes to voters' number-one concern: The foundering economy, with 43 percent favoring Obama, 42 percent preferring Clinton.

The poll does show that seven in 10 Democrats want that dream team: Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Obama.

Today, former president Bill Clinton for the first time sent a clear signal that the Clinton campaign has given serious consideration to that dream ticket too, combining Obama's urban appeal and Clinton's rural appeal.

"You look at the map of Texas and the map in Ohio, and the map in Missouri," Clinton said during a campaign stop on his wife's behalf in Mississippi, "You look at most of these places -- he would win the urban areas and the upscale voters, and she wins the traditional rural areas that we lost when President Reagan was president. If you put those two things together, you'd have an almost unstoppable force."

Obama said Friday he's not interested in holding the No. 2 slot on a Democratic dream team.

"You won't see me as a vice presidential candidate," Obama said in a radio interview.

Despite talk of a dream team, the bitter tone of the campaign for the White House is likely to get worse, with Clinton on the offensive and Obama walking a fine line, talking tough while trying to remain above the mudslinging.

Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King gave a taste of what could lie ahead.

In an interview with KICD radio in Spencer, Iowa, the congressman virtually called him a terrorist ally.

"If he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al Qaeda, the radical Islamists and their supporters will be dancing in the streets," King said. "They will be dancing in the streets because of his middle name."

If he does win the nomination, Obama will have to respond to Republicans, and to his conservative critics who pointedly refer to him using his full name, Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama looking for the Knockout Punch and Political Cartoon of the Day

On the math side, it is a certainty that Sen. Barack Obama's lead in pledged delegates, at least 151, according to the Associated Press, after 11 straight victories last month, most of them by wide margins, is so wide that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cannot catch up with anything less than blowout victories in the 60-40 percent range in both states.


On the eve of the Democrats' second Super Tuesday, polling is so close in both Texas and Ohio that the Clinton and Obama campaigns are preparing their own spin on what will matter when the nation wakes up Wednesday morning: Will it be math or momentum?

On the momentum side, however, if Clinton wins both states, even narrowly, she could blunt Obama's momentum and generate some of her own. Headlines will declare a Clinton victory in two giant states, lifting some of the pressure on her from party leaders to exit the race.

Obama's best chance for a knockout blow is Texas, where polls have given him a slight edge.

"Obama, to stop her, really has to win one of the two big states. Then the delegate math does take over," said Tad Devine, a top strategist for the Al Gore and John Kerry presidential campaigns.

But if Clinton wins both, she is likely to stay in the race.

"Even if the math works in Obama's favor, if he loses two big states, I don't think that's how you win the nomination," Devine said. "You don't win the nomination by losing. You have to win the nomination by winning, or at least splitting ... I think it's going to be incumbent on Obama to win one of those big states if he wants the race to end tomorrow."

Seeming to concede that Clinton could win the popular vote in both states, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said the race hinges instead on "the cold hard reality of the math."

There are 370 pledged delegates, the kind chosen by voters, at stake Tuesday in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont. Even if Clinton ekes out victories in all four, she cannot begin to close the delegate gap because delegates are awarded based on vote shares. A close outcome will distribute the delegates nearly evenly in each state.

"If we can come out of Tuesday night's contests with a pledged delegate lead still healthy in our favor, and we're able to maintain or even build on it, I think that's going to be a major event in the nomination fight," Plouffe said. A close Clinton victory is "simply not good enough," he said, and will require "more creative math and tortured explanations" to conceive a path to the nomination.

For the Clinton campaign, Tuesday's votes are all about momentum: ending Obama's string of huge victories, generating a long-overdue win and allowing her to fight on to the Pennsylvania primary seven weeks away, hoping that Obama implodes in the meantime.

That breather would give Clinton time to press the hard-hitting attacks that seek to generate "buyer's remorse" among Obama supporters by undermining Obama's credibility on national security, trade and his relationship with Chicago real estate developer Tony Rezko, whose racketeering trial has begun.

"We expect that by Wednesday morning, the momentum of Sen. Obama will be significantly blunted and new questions will be raised about whether he is the right nominee for our party," said top Clinton strategist Mark Penn.

"If we wake up Wednesday and Sen. Clinton wins Ohio and Texas, we have a whole new ballgame here," said Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson.

Clinton has watched her double-digit leads in both states vanish over the last two weeks, but her campaign said internal polling shows votes breaking her way. She would add two more big-state victories to her ledger, along with California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Ohio is critical in general elections, narrowly swinging for President Bush 2004. A Clinton win might persuade some super delegates - the elected and party officials who make up 20 percent of the 2,025 delegates needed to win the nomination - to stop jumping from Clinton's ship and allow her to continue the race.

By the same token, Clinton will be out of the race if she loses both Ohio and Texas and will find it all but impossible to continue if she loses one. The candidates are likely to split the two smaller states, as Clinton is ahead in Rhode Island and Obama in Vermont.

Garry South, a veteran Democratic strategist who once worked for California Gov. Gray Davis, said he voted for Clinton and feels bad for her but that Obama's advantage even now is overwhelming.

"The fact is, Barack Obama has been winning (earlier) states, not barely, but 2 to 1, 3 to 1," said South. "If she turns around and wins a close victory in Texas and Ohio, that doesn't change the momentum of the race" or flip Clinton's delegate count, in which South said she is "getting killed" by proportional delegate allocation.

"Look, I'm a world class spinner myself," South said. "I've had to spin myself in and out of all kinds of campaign situations over my 36 years in this business, but there comes a point where you can't spin away the facts."

Even if Clinton wins Texas and Ohio, however, she faces a tough calendar strikingly similar to the one she confronted after tying Obama on Super Tuesday Feb 5.

This time the wait for another big primary is even longer: seven weeks, not four, until Pennsylvania, with its 158 delegates and blue-collar base, where Clinton holds a large but declining lead. In between is a Wyoming caucus Saturday, exactly the kind of red-state, rally-style contest where Obama has a proven advantage. A week after tomorrow comes Mississippi, whose large African American population looks to be in Obama's pocket.

Though after Tuesday, there are still 611 delegates up for grabs in the remaining contests that end in June in Puerto Rico, many Democrats are eager for the rivalry to end so they can begin focusing on likely Republican nominee John McCain. Others worry that the sharply escalating negative attacks provide fodder for Republicans, who for now can sit back and let Democrats attack each other.

Some top superdelegates have begun to call for the race to end. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Sunday that whoever is ahead in pledged delegates after Tuesday should be the nominee. Neither candidate can win the Democratic nomination on pledged delegates alone, thanks to the proportional allocation of delegates.

"Some superdelegates might see (wins by Clinton today) as persuasive enough to take the pressure off of her to drop out," said Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas in Austin. "They might then say, 'Go ahead and go through Pennsylvania, we won't gang up on you and attempt to get you to quit,' as was happening over the last week."

Clinton's negative attacks, and Obama's aggressive responses, have escalated in the last few days, but experts say they do not feel they have crossed the line to be damaging to either candidate.

"These are charges that certainly would come out in a general election against either of these two candidates," South said. "And they better damn well be prepared to deal with them in the fall. One of the ways you do that is by having to fend off these kinds of charges during the primary election campaign."

John Gilliom, a political scientist at Ohio University, said the candidates are still in a healthy process of "checking for glass jaws." Voters "want to know what Sen. Obama's answers are on the various questions she's been asking," he said. "They're going to be asked in a lot tougher way later on."

If anything, they may be toughening Obama, who has enjoyed positive press coverage and comparatively little scrutiny.

What Happened to Clinton Campaign and Political Cartoon of the Day

The cartoon of the day is just a quick little photo of Hillary Clinton in a rare moment releasing some stress. Lately I have been picking on her a little bit and maybe this cartoon will be the last for a little while? I try to be fair but I have noticed the trend and will try to remedy it. Now on to the real stuff

Hillary Clinton may be one of the most disciplined figures in national politics, but she has presided over a campaign operation riven by feuding, rival fiefdoms and second-guessing of top staff members.

Those tensions partly explain why Clinton today stands where, just a few months ago, few expected she'd be: struggling to catch up to Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. If she loses either of the crucial contests Tuesday in Texas and Ohio, Clinton may face calls from senior party officials to end her campaign.

As they mapped out a campaign schedule for Bill Clinton, top aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton kept his time short in South Carolina. They were probably going to lose the state, they figured, and they wanted their most powerful surrogate to move on to Georgia, Alabama and other Southern states.

But the former president shelved the plan, according to campaign aides. Day after day he stayed in South Carolina, getting into angry confrontations with the press and others. In the end, Hillary Clinton lost the Jan. 26 vote there by a 2-to-1 margin and saw her standing with African Americans nationwide become strained.

Some polls show her leading in Ohio but tied in Texas; the race in both states is considered close.

Already, some in Clinton's senior staff are pointing fingers over what went wrong, with some of the blame aimed at Clinton herself. As the race unfolded, neither Clinton nor anyone else resolved the internal power struggles that played out with destructive effect and continue to this day.

Chief strategist Mark and pollster Penn clashed with senior advisor Harold Ickes, former deputy campaign manager Mike Henry and others. Field organizers battled with Clinton's headquarters in northern Virginia. Campaign themes were rolled out and discarded, reflecting tensions among a staff bitterly divided over what Clinton's basic message should be.

The dispute over Bill Clinton's schedule shows how easily plans can unravel. Some campaign staffers didn't expect to win South Carolina overall, but "our strategy was to go after specific districts in South Carolina" to add to the delegate total while freeing Bill Clinton to spend time in other Southern states, said a Clinton campaign aide.

But Bill Clinton said " 'I need to be in South Carolina,' " the aide said. "It was a one-man mission out there."

Obama, who leads Clinton in delegates, would pose problems for any candidate. But aides to Clinton said the dysfunction within her campaign team made its task that much tougher.

Joe Trippi, a senior advisor to John Edwards' now-dropped Democratic campaign, said: "At some point the candidate has to step in and bust heads and say 'Enough!'

"If there's fighting internally, the candidate has to step up and make it clear what direction she wants to go and stop this stuff dead in its tracks. Otherwise there's going to be a struggle for power and control right until the end. It's crippling."

Last month, after a series of defeats, Hillary Clinton chose a new campaign manager, replacing Patti Solis Doyle. But she left in place many senior people, including Penn and Ickes, who have been involved in incessant turf wars.

As the campaign faces a make-or-break moment, some high-level officials are trying to play down their role in the campaign. Penn said in an e-mail over the weekend that he had "no direct authority in the campaign," describing himself as merely "an outside message advisor with no campaign staff reporting to me."

By September, Iowa staff were sending out warnings about Obama's strength. "We are being outnumbered on the ground on a daily basis by his campaign, and it is beginning to show results," said a memo to top campaign officials on Sept. 26, about three months before the state's caucuses.

One running debate within Clinton's campaign was whether her defeats -- she has lost 11 straight contests -- were due to organizational lapses or a faulty message.

Some aides say organizational problems were the most significant, as Obama outworked Clinton in many states and sent in organizers earlier.