James Forsyth 2:50am
Call this typical press arrogance, but in every race I’ve followed in this primary process, the campaign most open to the press has won. By this measure, we’re in for a shock tomorrow in North Carolina.
This evening I called in at both the Clinton and Obama offices in Raleigh. At the Clinton HQ, after some gentle ribbing about my failure to remove my credentials from the Obama event earlier, I was ushered in to talk to the field director who happily chatted away about their operation which sounds formidable. Significantly, the...
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James Forsyth 2:29am
One of the great sub-plots of the North Carolina primary is that it is Bill Clinton’s chance to atone for his performance in South Carolina. His red-faced appearances and, to be charitable, clumsy comparison of Obama’s win to Jesse Jackson’s compounded the impact of Obama’s massive victory there and did much to push Teddy Kennedy towards endorsing Obama. After South Carolina, the conventional wisdom shifting to seeing Bill as not an asset but a liability for the campaign. Here, though, he is an undoubted asset. Reprising the role he played in Texas,...
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James Forsyth 9:57pm
Raleigh, North Carolina
The Obama campaign has yet to declare where their candidate will spend tomorrow night. You can either interpret this as a sign of confidence—they think that they have a chance of winning Indiana and sealing the deal—or nerves—they worry that North Carolina is not the lock that it seems.
The Obama campaign’s own post Super-Tuesday projection had Obama winning both states and Obama himself has called Indiana a “tie-breaker” but the conventional wisdom now expects Clinton to win Indiana handily and limit Obama’s margin in North...
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James Forsyth 8:58pm
Raleigh, North Carolina
Barack Obama’s final event here in North Carolina was surprisingly low-key. The event was an invitation only town-hall meeting at CREE, a green energy firm in the Research Triangle. The audience was demographically suited to Obama—affluent, educated, relatively young and fairly mixed racially—and gave him a warm reception. But the event lacked the tempo you would have expected the day before the primary. Indeed, before the QandA Obama even invited the boss of CREE to give an infomercial for his products.
Obama opened by saying ‘I want...
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James Forsyth 1:59pm
The USA Today poll suggests that the Democratic race really might have turned. It finds that among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents Clinton now leads nationally by seven, compared to a ten point advantage for Obama just a fortnight ago. Clinton is also now seen as the stronger candidate against John McCain—a dramatic shift from the previous poll where by a 33 percent margin Obama was seen as the best candidate for the general election. The damage seems to have been done by the Rev Wright affair which eight out of ten voters...
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