A Longer Race Benefits Obama
By David Broder
WASHINGTON -- Heading into Tuesday's unprecedented day of voting in nearly two dozen states, a degree of order is finally emerging in the dramatic races for the presidential nominations of both parties.
Public opinion and leadership support are finding their way to the same destinations, pointing to a clear favorite and a single viable alternative in each race.
John McCain has the easiest path remaining to the Republican nomination, with Mitt Romney needing some kind of dramatic breakthrough Tuesday to keep his hopes of an upset alive.
On the Democratic side, the battle is more even, but the advantage has shifted back to Barack Obama -- thanks to a growing but largely unremarked tendency among Democratic leaders to reject Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president.
The New York senator could still emerge from the "Tsunami Tuesday" voting with the overall lead in delegates, but she is unlikely to be able to come close to clinching the nomination. And the longer the race goes on, the better the chances that Obama will ultimately prevail, as more elected Democratic officials and candidates come to view him as the better bet to defeat McCain in November.
As the race has moved from contests in small states such as Iowa and New Hampshire to the national dimension of Tuesday's voting, the role of the endorsements and leadership testimonials has increased. The candidates simply lack the time and resources to make personal appeals to very many voters.
Had McCain not invested that personal time in New Hampshire, with more than 100 town meetings where he argued for the correctness of his views on the Iraq War, he could not have reversed the summertime disaster that overtook his campaign, when he ran out of money and lost most of his senior staff.
But after turning back Romney in New Hampshire, the Arizona senator picked up significant establishment backing in South Carolina and Florida -- the hard-core Republican states where he had to show his credentials. He campaigned in South Carolina flanked by Tom Coburn and Jack Kemp, icons of social and fiscal conservatism, and won Florida thanks to last-minute endorsements from Gov. Charlie Crist and Sen. Mel Martinez.
Now, with defeated Rudy Giuliani adding his voice to the chorus of endorsements, and with Mike Huckabee remaining in the race to challenge Romney from the religious right, McCain appears poised to lock up the nomination.
Unelected conservative ideologues -- Rush Limbaugh and George Will -- can mutter in frustration, but Republican politicians recognize what was written here as long ago as last Dec. 2: "If the Republican Party really wanted to hold on to the White House in 2009 ... it would grit its teeth, swallow its doubts and nominate a ticket of John McCain for president and Mike Huckabee for vice president -- and president-in-waiting."
The Democratic race remains harder to handicap, in part because Clinton already has demonstrated her resilience by fighting uphill battles to prevail in New Hampshire and Nevada and because she retains formidable alliances and organizational strengths.
But the last two weeks have seen a remarkable shift of establishment opinion against her and against the prospect of placing the party's 2008 chances in the hands of her husband, Bill Clinton.
The prominence of his role in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and the mean-spiritedness of his attacks on Obama, stunned many Democrats. Clinton's behavior underlined the warning raised in this column before Iowa, by a prominent veteran of the Clinton administration, that the prospect of two presidents both named Clinton sharing a single White House would be a huge problem for the Democrats in November if she is the nominee.
The negatives on the Clintons have brought much support to Obama, most notably that of Ted Kennedy, the most prestigious figure in the Democratic establishment in Washington. But it is also Obama's own appeal that is being talked about across the country from Massachusetts to Arizona by the younger generation of governors, senators and representatives who share with him an eagerness to "turn the page" on the battles of the past.
Obama is not inevitable, but the longer the race continues, the greater that hunger. And the growing recognition of McCain's appeal to independents also works in Obama's favor.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/a_longer_race_benefits_obama.html
Thursday, January 31, 2008
A Longer Race Benefits Obama
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Iowa Caucus: The Democrats
CAPTAIN ED BLOG
By Ed Morrissey on 2008
Hillary Clinton has run into a serious buzz saw on her way to the coronation. Not only did she not win the state, but she lost to the wrong candidate. Barack Obama now threatens to steal away a nomination that the Clintons thought they had in the bank less than three months ago.
Clinton would have had a tough time winning Iowa in any case. The populist appeal of John Edwards always figured to take some significant support away from Hillary. However, a second-place finish to Edwards would not have had much impact on her campaign, because Edwards has little appeal outside of the populist Midwest. She could easily have survived that kind of loss, without even considering it a bump in the road.
Instead, Barack Obama beat both of them, and that's an ill portent for Hillary's march to the nomination. Obama beat Hillary in a state that has a very small African-American demographic; he won not by playing the race card, but by simply offering a departure from Clintonian politics. That victory will resonate in New Hampshire, where Obama already has her in a dead heat, but also in the following states.
Even worse, Hillary finished in third place, behind Edwards, after working the state hard for the past three weeks. Edwards, meanwhile, didn't improve over his performance in 2004. He wound up actually two points lower, 30% as opposed to 32%. Hillary couldn't take advantage of the decline, and trailing a stagnating Edwards won't give Democratic primary voters any confidence in her ability to beat Obama, let alone a Republican in November.
Hillary has reaped the harvest of two months of self-inflicted wounds, starting with her collapse on drivers licenses for illegal aliens, and through some bizarre attacks on Barack Obama in the aftermath. The question will be whether she can recover from the rapid decline. The answer: she's no Bill Clinton.
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Iowa Caucus: The Republicans
By Ed Morrissey on 2008
This started off sounding like the Super Bowl -- the big-money Immovable Object meeting the grassroots Unstoppable Force. Iowans turned it into the usual kind of Super Bowl, a laugher, as Mike Huckabee stunned Mitt Romney with a nine-point win. Huckabee beat Romney by a much wider margin than anyone predicted, even larger than the five-point gap that I posted earlier this evening.
What does this mean for Romney? It's a body blow. He spent somewhere between $8-9 million and came up far short of a victory. That directly reflects on his next race, where John McCain has taken the lead in his backyard. If he can't do any better against McCain than he did against Huckabee, Republican voters will rightly question whether Romney can win anywhere, even with the huge funding advantage he has had.
If McCain wins in New Hampshire, Romney has serious problems, but it assists the other 50-state candidate: Rudy Giuliani. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Giuliani was smart enough not to waste time in Iowa, and he won't tangle in New Hampshire, either. If Romney gets derailed, it leaves the Super Tuesday field open to Giuliani, who already has leads in the big coastal states. He's an experienced campaigner, and this Romney loss validates his strategy.
Fred Thompson and John McCain, at this moment, still struggle for third place. McCain just needed a significant showing for his upcoming battle in New Hampshire, but Thompson needed a third-place finish just to keep his credibility alive. It looks like he did that, and conservatives who had made a mad rush to help him stay afloat in the last two weeks have longer to build momentum for him. If they can make a big push in South Carolina, he could get back in the race -- but that also helps Giuliani.
Finally, Ron Paul did a respectable 10% in this race -- not bad, but no better than fifth place. The Paul supporters who kept insisting that their man had been victimized by pollsters conspiring to make him look weak in the race will have to explain away a fifth-place finish in a field of seven, only beating Giuliani because he didn't bother to campaign there. A 10% finish won't derail either John McCain or Mitt Romney in New Hampshire. In fact, both men may need to worry about Mike Huckabee, and Romney more than McCain.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Behind the Scenes at Obama's Headquarters
Peek Inside Obama's Headquarters April 5, 2007 Phil Rogers takes a tour through Sen. Barack Obama's campaign headquarters.
http://video.nbc5.com/player/?id=88519
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Recent Obama Video of Interest
Sen. McCain Responds To Sen. Obama On The Situation Room
Obama on Being President CNN
http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/politics/2007/03/28/blitzer.obama.intv.cnn&am...
Friday, March 9, 2007
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Senator Barack Obama in Cleveland, OH 2-26-07
Great photo from the grassroots media.
Photo by IvorK
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivork/
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Barack Obama Hosted By Sen. Barbara Boxer In San Francisco
A very well done video...well worth the time to watch.
Las Vegas 2/18/07
A great picture that you will probably not see in the newspaper,taken by a member of the audience at the rally.
