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.

Clinton Ahead in Critical Moments says Ohio Poll & Political Cartoon of the Day

In the Political Cartoon of the day we show the New and Modern Hillary Clinton ready for the Midwestern Struggle. Her new attire brought to you by Midwestern Cartoon Chic from an unknown designer in Ohio. Polls show that this new Clinton Model is working well in the Midwest, Voters seem to love the Political Cartoon Hillary more than Confrontational, Health Care Hillary. Super Delegate or not, she needs to pull a big win to even stand a chance at receiving the nomination.

Clinton drew the support of 47 percent of those surveyed in the new poll, Obama 39 percent. Yet there is a wild card in the results of this new survey: 9 percent of the likely Democratic voters surveyed said they intend to vote for former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who has withdrawn from the race, and 4 percent were undecided.

Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York holds an eight-percentage-point advantage over Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois among likely Democratic voters in Ohio, according to the results of a new Ohio Poll this morning which arrive as welcome news for Clinton’s hopes of regaining her footing in the contest for the party’s presidential nomination.

The spread between Clinton and Obama also stands at the edges of the poll's potential 4.3 percentage-point margin of error.

In addition, while the Ohio Poll has no benchmark by which to compare Clinton's position today with her stance in recent weeks, a new Univerfsity Poll shows Clinton has lost some of the advantage she had over Obama in Ohio just two weeks ago.

Clinton has a 51-40 percentage point advantage over Obama among Ohio Democratic voters in the Quinnipiac poll released today. This compares with her 55-34 point advantage in survey run by Quinnipiac earlier this month and reported on Feb. 14. The newest Feb. 18-23 survey of 1,853 Ohio registered voters carries a possible margin of error of 2.3 percent.

The results of these Ohio polls arrive on the eve of a televised debate between Clinton and Obama in one of the states which Clinton counts on to breathe new life into her presidential campaign. Following a string of primary and caucus victories for Obama, Clinton is counting on voters in Ohio and Texas on March 4 to reaffirm her claim as a contender for the nomination. The two face each other in debate Tuesday night.

The Ohio polls suggest that Clinton might want to play the debate presidentially -- firm, but without the appearance of worry about any threat in her highly successful rival. Obama is likely to reprise his own appearance in Texas last week, playing to the same level of confidence.

The intensity of Clinton’s campaign-trail challenges to Obama in recent days is a measure of the stakes in Ohio and Texas on March 4, with Clinton counting on victories there to regain her balance in a contest for the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention this summer. Obama has gained a lead in that contest.

The precariousness of the primary contest in bellwether Ohio next week is born out in today’s Ohio Poll, a product of the University of Cincinnati’s polling institute. The survey was conducted from Feb. 21 through Sunday. The possible margin of error among Democrats surveyed is 4.3 percent, and among Republicans surveyed 5.5 percent.

The Ohio debate also raises the question of which Clinton will show up:

The smiling, conciliatory Clinton who debated Obama in Texas last week in a largely civil encounter in which both refrained from bitter campaign-trail rhetoric.

Or the explosive Clinton who declared, “Shame on you, Barack Obama,’’ on the road in recent days, complaining about campaign mailings which the Obama camp has sent to voters – and the derisive Clinton who mocks the platitudes of the Obama campaign as playing to some sort of “celestial-choir’’ vision of miraculous results with empty rhetoric.

Republican Sen. John McCain holds a comfortable lead among Republican voters. The Arizona senator, on track to become his party’s presidential nominee, claimed the support of 55 percent of the likely voters in Ohio’s Republican primary next week, with former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arizona claiming 20 percent.

“A variety of issues are influencing Republican primary voter decisions about the 2008 presidential race,’’ the Ohio Poll repots, “including: the economy/jobs (30 percent, homeland security/national defense (16 percent), the war in Iraq/Iraq policy (9 percent), health care/health insurance (8 percent), abortion (7 percent) and taxes (6 percent.)’’

The economy weighs heavily on the minds of Democratic voters in Ohio, the survey shows, with 41 percent saying the economy and jobs will weigh heavily in their vote, 25 percent citing health care and insurance and 25 percent the war in Iraq.

Delegates, SuperDelegates & Cartoon of the Day

Todays Political Cartoon is about the SuperDelegates of This years elections. How much of an impact will they play and how pissed could the public be? In a time where nominees are trying to get as much as possible could it come down to who has the SuperDelegate Swagger? What about the regular Delegate, are they just the tossed out packaging used to convince us that our vote does matter?

Obama had 1,303 before all of delegates from Wisconsin and Hawaii were factored in, according to The Associated Press, while Clinton had 1,233.

The figures included some superdelegates — politicians and party officials who aren’t awarded in the primaries and can vote any way they want at the convention.

Clinton’s fear, as the race goes on, is that a continuing surge for Obama will convince more and more superdelegates to move from her side of the fence, leaving her campaign in tatters.

Obama's latest victories in Wisconsin and Hawaii placed intense pressure on Clinton to triumph in Ohio and Texas early next month to salvage her campaign after a bitter, historic battle rolling heavily in Obama’s favour.

In capturing Hawaii, Obama, vying to become the first black U.S. president, captured 20 convention delegates needed to become the party nominee.

However, Wisconsin was the bigger prize, offering 74 delegates and — with its large number of blue collar voters — a preview of what could happen in industrialized states like Ohio on March 4.

Obama was attracting lower-income and unionized voters that usually side with Clinton, and splitting the support of white women who have flocked to her in the past.

Recent polls suggested Clinton was still leading Obama in Ohio but her long-held advantage in Texas had nearly vanished. Pennsylvania votes in April.

“Both Senator Obama and I would make history,” Clinton told a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, where she didn’t mention her loss in Wisconsin. “But only one of us is ready on Day 1 to be commander in chief, ready to manage our economy, and ready to defeat the Republicans. Only one of us has spent 35 years being a doer, a fighter and a champion for those who need a voice.”

For the Republicans, presumptive nominee John McCain added to his own delegate count while trying to shake remaining rival Mike Huckabee.

He won the Republican primaries in Wisconsin and Washington state. A

t a rally in Columbus, Ohio, he zeroed in on Obama as his likely opponent in November’s general election, criticizing his inexperience in foreign affairs and saying his soaring oratory lacks substance.

“I will fight every moment of every day in this campaign to make sure Americans are not deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change,” he said. “I will wage a campaign of determination, passion and the right ideas.”

Obama hit back in his own speech, saying McCain “represents the policy of yesterday and we want to be the party of tomorrow.”

Polls in advance of Wisconsin had suggested a closer Democratic race, and it should have been a competitive state for Clinton given that voters are mostly white, with lower incomes and don’t have college degrees.

Seven in 10 voters said U.S. trade with other countries costs jobs.

Clinton’s camp released a plan late Tuesday promising to “dramatically strengthen” the trade deal’s labour and environmental provisions, boost enforcement mechanisms and change rules allowing foreign companies to challenge American laws at tribunals outside the U.S. court system.

The Democratic race has become increasingly testy, with the Clinton camp accusing Obama on the weekend of plagarizing part of a speech from his friend, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

Patrick has dismissed the charges as bogus since he has helped the campaign with speechwriting. Obama noted that Clinton has borrowed some of his phrases in her public appearances.

Clinton argues that she’s the only one who can stand up to the Republican attack machine.

Both Obama and Clinton have been emphasizing plans to help struggling families. And they’ve been taking shots at the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

Obama has slammed the deal as one reason the country is facing economic turmoil and issued a rebuke to Clinton, whose husband pushed hard for the NAFTA over the objections of many Democrats.

His campaign has already distributed mass mailings critical of Clinton on the issue in Ohio.