Obama wins Mississippi

Fox called the Mississippi primary for Barack Obama as soon as the polls closed, suggesting that he’s won big. The exit polls, though, do point to the problems he’ll have in uniting the Democratic party if he does win the nomination with almost three-quarters of Clinton voters saying they would be dissatisfied if Obama wins the nomination. Also concerning for Obama is that more than half of Clinton's supporters said they had a favourable view of John McCain.

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How much nastier can this get?

It is worth just recapping the back and forth between the Clinton and Obama campaigners and their supporters in this news cycle as it gives you an idea of how bitter things are becoming.

Today the Obama campaign sent out a memo that eviscerated her national security record, the McCain campaign will keep this in their back pocket just in case Hillary does clinch the nomination. Here are some highlights:

Hillary Clinton’s argument that she has passed “the Commander- in-Chief test” is simply not supported by her record...

Senator Clinton has

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How big will Obama win tonight?

Barack Obama should win the Mississippi primary by a comfortable margin tonight. The polls suggest that he has a double digit lead and 2004 indicates that more than half of the primary electorate will be African-American, since South Carolina Obama has been consistently receiving 80 percent plus of the black vote.

With the Eliot Spitzer story dominating the news and a big win already factored in to the calculations of most pundits, Obama won’t get much of a boost unless he wins by an absolute blow-out margin. Interestingly, Obama is in Pennsylvania tonight with no evening event scheduled which indicates that his campaign is expecting a solid not spectacular victory tonight.

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Hillary's home advantage

Politicians have a tendency to be from far more places than the rest of us. Hillary Clinton is no exception to this rule. We always thought that she came from the Chicago suburbs but now it turns out that she has roots in Pennsylvania too, conveniently the site of an upcoming and crucial primary. Some old home video of her running about in Scranton, Pennsylvania—her father’s hometown where she used to summer—is now being promoted by the Clinton campaign and I expect we’ll see an ad featuring it before the primary on...

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Cheer for McCain

Opinion is divided over whether the ongoing Democratic primary contest helps or hurt John McCain. Some say that it writes him out of the news, making him look like an irrelevance. Others claim that by the end of it, the Democratic nominee will be so bloodied that they will have been seriously weakened for the general election campaign. Ryan Lizza’s excellent essay in The New Yorker suggests that the later is more likely. As Lizza writes,

“The newfound strength of Clinton’s war room is vital for her going forward. Her campaign realizes

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Obama wins Wyoming but he has a Commander in Chief problem

As widely expected, Barack Obama won the Wyoming caucus claiming 7 of the twelve delegates on offer and winning 61 percent of the vote. However, the Obama camp will be concerned by a new poll in Newsweek that shows that only 18 percent of Americans trust Obama the most to answer that 3am phone call. By contrast, 27 percent preferred Hillary and 45 percent McCain. 

Obviously, in a one on one race with McCain either Hillary or Obama’s numbers would increase. But this does suggest that McCain starts out with a significant advantage on national security. Expect to see his campaign push this message in the weeks ahead as the Democrats continue their nomination fight.  

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What is Hillary planning?

Last month, there was a terrible fuss when a story appeared suggesting that the Clinton campaign was going to start going after Obama’s elected delegates in its attempt to win the nomination. The theory was that individual delegates would be induced into going against the will of the people who elected them and that could help Hillary to the 2024 delegates needed to win the nomination. In the end, the Clinton campaign had to quickly pledge not to do this in an attempt to kill the story which played perfectly into...

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How the Democrats want to define McCain

Whoever is the Democratic nominee, will try and portray a vote for John McCain as a vote for George W. Bush. So while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to lay into each other, the Democratic National Committee is pumping out videos trying to link McCain to Bush.

I’m sceptical as to whether this will work. The McCain brand is, I think, strong enough and distinctive enough for voters to realise that he is a very different proposition from Bush.

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Power down

Partly out of necessity, partly out of choice Barack Obama has reached beyond the usual circle of Washington wonks to staff up his policy shop. But in the last week, two of his smartest advisors have got him into trouble and one of them has had to step down.

First of all there was theflap over Austan Goolsbee, a brilliant U Chicago economist who is one of Obama’s top domestic policy advisors, telling the Canadians that Obama’s criticisms of Nafta were more an expression of politic than policy. Now, Samantha Power,...

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The Keystone to it all

It is hard to overstate the importance of the Pennsylvania primary. If Obama triumphs on April 222nd, then Hillary Clinton will find herself under huge pressure to pull out. Party elders will argue that continuing the contest will only help the Republicans and that by winning in Pennsylvania Obama has shown that he can win over those part of the Democratic coalition that have so far been resistant to his charms—seniors, white ethnics and those with only a high school education. However, if Hillary wins it’ll be very hard to stop her taking...

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