Obama wins another three, can Hillary stop him now?
Barack Obama and John McCain both behaved as if the general election campaign had started last night. Their speeches centred more on each other than their current opponents. Hillary Clinton must have had a horrible feeling of irrelevance as these two went at it.
Barack Obama and John McCain both behaved as if the general election campaign had started last night. Their speeches centred more on each other than their current opponents. Hillary Clinton must have had a horrible feeling of irrelevance as these two went at it.
Obama has now won all eight post-Super Tuesday contests and is 11 points up in Wisconsin which votes next week along with the state where he grew up, Hawaii. He has momentum on his side and Hillary on the back foot. Again, he racked up impressive margins—getting 60 percent of the vote in Virginia, Maryland and DC. He also appears to be extending his support base; winning all income and age groups in both states.
Clinton now must hold Obama off in the March 4th primaries. If she does not, the calls for her to gracefully drop out will begin. Her campaign is continuing to reshuffle but she urgently needs to get on the front foot. But the disastrous consequences of Bill behaving like an attack dog in South Carolina means that if the Clinton camp is to go negative, Hillary herself must do it.
For McCain, Tuesday was not as decisive as he would have wished. While he won all three contests, as expected, he was ran far closer in Virginia than he would have liked—in an effectively two person race, he only just scrambled over the 50 percent mark. A decisive victory might have forced Mike Huckabee, his remaining opponent, from the race. But the narrow margin of his win means that Huckabee is likely to solider on for a while yet. The encouraging thing for McCain is that his victory speech which implicitly took on Obama was effective and showed that he has a plausible strategy against him for what seems set to be this autumn’s campaign.