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.

Obama beating Hillary, McCain Leads In Texas & Cartoon of the Day

In the Political Cartoon of the day we stray a little from the current events at hand and just let the Political Cartoon Itself make up for the lack of relevancy. Nothing better than a little nude Cartoon Bush to get a little laugh out of you. Now to some relevant issues.

In Houston on Thursday, McCain said he can pull conservative voters to his side for the general election because he offers clear policy differences with Clinton and Obama.

For instance, he remarked, "we are succeeding in Iraq, something that Senator Obama and Senator Clinton won't acknowledge."

As the Arizona senator acknowledged, he is still working on winning his party's nomination and the backing of many conservatives, who disagree with his push for earned citizenship opportunities for illegal immigrants, endorsement of campaign finance reforms and other issues.

Huckabee told a Waco audience he is the only true conservative in the race, and the only major candidate of either party "without a Washington address." Though trailing McCain badly in the national convention delegate count, Huckabee said he is not about to give up.

"You can beat me but you can't make me quit," Huckabee said with a defiant smile.

Clinton had held a lead in the race that evaporated in the past several weeks.

One area where she apparently bounced back in the past month was in fundraising. Obama shocked her in January by raising $36 million to her $14 million. Clinton aides told The Associated Press on Thursday that Clinton raised $35 million in February. Obama's campaign said he had raised more than $50 million in February, but did not release the amount.

"It was incredibly gratifying to see people come forth with this vote of confidence in me," Clinton told reporters in Hanging Rock, Ohio. "Obviously this is a tremendous benefit to my campaign."

The money could give Clinton the ability to soldier on even if Texas is a setback for her in the fight for delegates to the national nominating convention.

Clinton was in Houston on Thursday night for an energy summit.

Momentum is clearly on Obama's side, though. A Texas Democratic superdelegate — state Rep. Senfronia Thompson of Houston — Thursday switched her support from Clinton to Obama.

Pollster John Zogby said the statistics that really show the momentum for Obama is the timing of when people made up their mind on how to vote. He said Clinton leads "substantially" among those who made up their minds more than a month ago, but Obama leads almost "two-to-one" among those who made up their minds recently.

Earlier in the day, Obama held a town hall meeting in Austin to talk about the economy, which he said is on the brink of a recession.

"This was not an inevitable part of the business cycle," Obama said. "It was a failure of leadership in Washington — a Washington where George Bush hands out billions of tax cuts to the wealthiest few for eight long years, and John McCain promises to make those same tax cuts permanent."

Obama also criticized McCain's statements about staying in Iraq for 100 years, saying that would cost trillions of dollars. Obama favors a total pullout from Iraq within a year after taking office.

McCain responded in Houston by saying his comments about Iraq have been taken out of context. He said he was talking about a military presence to guarantee stability, not an ongoing war.

"No American argues against our military presence in Korea or Japan or Germany or Kuwait or other places, or Turkey, because America is not receiving casualties," McCain said. "I think, generally speaking, we have a more secure world thanks to American presence, particularly in Asia, by the way, as we see the rising influence of China."

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama appears to be consolidating a lead over Hillary Rodham Clinton among most constituent groups in Texas except Hispanics, according to a new tracking poll.

The survey found Obama leading 48.2 percent to 41.7 percent over Clinton statewide. The poll, conducted Tuesday through Thursday for the Houston Chronicle, Reuters and C-SPAN by Zogby International, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

On the Republican side, U.S. Sen. John McCain appears headed to victory in Texas over former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Texas congressman Ron Paul of Lake Jackson. McCain led with 53.4 percent support to Huckabee's 26.8 percent and Paul's 10.7 percent in a survey that had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. McCain led among all groups, including self-identified conservatives.

The tracking poll, which will be conducted daily until next Tuesday's election, found Obama leading with both men and women. He and Clinton were essentially tied among Anglos, but he held 84.9 percent support among blacks and she had the support of 54.9 percent of the Hispanics surveyed.

That Hispanic backing helped give Clinton a lead in South Texas of 66.7 percent. She also led in West Texas, which would include heavily Hispanic El Paso.

Obama led in every other region and was supported by about 60 percent of those surveyed in Houston and Dallas — which have more nominating delegates at stake than all of the region from San Antonio to Brownsville to El Paso.

Next Tuesday's primaries in Texas and Ohio are crucial for Clinton to keep her campaign alive in the face of Obama's surge in the past three weeks. The tracking poll in Ohio showed a close race, with Clinton leading 44.1 percent to 41.5 percent over Obama. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

Hillary Accepts no defeat & Cartoon of the Day

First for the Cartoon of the Day:
This Election Cartoon is just a nice representation of where Hillary stands in the current race. The Political Cartoon is a great depiction of her "grasping for straws" strategy that currently is inching her forward in this election.

Reeling from her Democratic rival's 11 straight wins in nominating contests, Senator Clinton rejected the perception that her performance Thursday in a high-stakes debate in Austin, Texas, had a valedictory tone.

"This is going to be a spirited election between now and March 4," Clinton told supporters at a rally in Dallas, Texas.

Hillary Clinton Friday denied she was contemplating defeat for her White House bid, after her wistful tribute to Barack Obama in a debate was seen by some observers as an admission of looming failure.

"I am thrilled at the depth and breadth of support I have across the state," she said, knowing that Texas, along with Ohio, makes up a pair of must-win contests for her.

But in the debate the night before, the generous tribute she paid to her rival was seen by some commentators as an admission that her quest to be the first woman president could fall short.

"You know, no matter what happens in this contest -- and I am honored, I am honored to be here with Barack Obama. I am absolutely honored," she said, and reached out to shake his hand.

While Clinton was making the case that her campaign was not on its last legs, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain was back in Indiana, attempting to shrug off news reports that connected him to corporate lobbyists and one, in the New York Times, that suggested he had had an improper relationship with a female lobbyist.

Besides the pressure of a lagging campaign, the death of a police motorcyclist who crashed while escorting Clinton in Dallas Friday cast a pall of sadness over her team.

"I just learned of the death of a Dallas police officer in a devastating accident that occurred as these motorcycle officers were leading our cars to this site," Clinton said.

"We are just heartsick over this loss of life and I have asked that my condolences be conveyed to the family."

Meanwhile Clinton's camp sought to turn her melancholy remarks in the debate to her favor.

"What we saw in the final moments in that debate is why Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States," her spokesman Howard Wolfson said in a statement.

"Her strength, her life experience, her compassion. She's tested and ready. It was the moment she retook the reins of this race and showed women and men why she is the best choice."

Senator Obama, who leads Clinton 1368 to 1271 in the race to win enough delegates to capture the Democratic nomination, made several appearances in Texas Friday, one of two large states to hold primaries on March 4 expected to either rescue or end Clinton's White House hopes.

Now favored to win the Democratic nomination, Obama -- who seeks to become the country's first African-American president -- spent part of the time jousting with McCain over US foreign policy.

McCain attempted to skewer Obama over his offer in Thursday's debate to speak to leaders of US foes without preconditions, focusing on Cuba after the resignation of Fidel Castro.

"So Raul Castro gets an audience with an American president, and all the prestige such a meeting confers, without having to release political prisoners, allow free media, political parties, and labor unions, or schedule internationally monitored free elections," McCain said.

"Senator Obama says he would meet Cuba's dictator without any such steps in the hope that talk will make things better for Cuba's oppressed people."

Obama hit back in his own statement: "John McCain would give us four more years of the same Bush-McCain policies that have failed US interests and the Cuban people for the last 50 years.

"My policy will be based on the principle of liberty for the Cuban people, and I will seek that goal through strong and direct presidential diplomacy."