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Obama sweeps, McCain frustrated

James Forsyth

Sunday, 10th February 2008

Barack Obama tilted the Democratic presidential contest in his favour on Saturday with a string of commanding victories. He won both the Nebraska and Washington caucuses with more than two thirds of the vote and beat Hillary Clinton by 21 points in the Louisiana primary.

Obama was expected to win all these contests but his margins of victory were impressive and ensured that even with the Democrat’s proportional distribution of delegates he takes the lion’s share of the delegates available. For Obama the key thing now is to arrive at the convention with a significant lead among elected delegates. If he does that, it is hard to see how the unelected super delegates could deny him the nomination.

Today’s contest in Maine is Hillary’s best chance to win a contest in February. The fact that it is a caucus favours Obama, who has superior organisation, but the demographic composition of the electorate, lots of white voters who earn under $50,000 a year, is ideal for Hillary.

If Hillary does not win in Maine she is likely to go 0 for 9 in the post Super-Tuesday contests; allowing Obama to gain real momentum going into the big March 4th contests in Texas and Ohio. Obama is expected to clean up in Maryland, Virginia and DC on Tuesday where the polls show him with considerable leads. Tellingly, Hillary plans to spend election night in Texas suggesting that her campaign is neither confident about Tuesday’s results nor the subsequent contests in Wisconsin and Hawaii.

As I argued in this week’s magazine, if Obama has a fortnight to campaign in Texas and Ohio with a set of victories under his belt he could breach Hillary’s firewall. If he did that, he would be well placed to surge down the finishing strait and arrive at the convention in Denver as the undeniably stronger candidate.

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee won two of Saturday’s three contest. He thumped McCain in Kansas and narrowly edged him out in Louisiana, as he had in other Southern state on Super Tuesday. Indeed, McCain’s only victory was a slim one in the Washington caucuses. None of this will seriously impeded McCain’s march to the nomination but it does ensure that Huckabee will stay in the race longer and that the talk of McCain’s weakness with the base of the party won’t go away. McCain now needs to win big in Tuesday’s three primaries to reassert his authority.