WASHINGTON — Buoyed by an unbroken string of recent victories, Barack Obama shifted his fire yesterday to presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain, in an effort to cast himself as the sole Democratic challenger.
Mr. McCain seemed willing to oblige and the two traded gibes in what may be a harbinger of the presidential contest next fall. Hillary Clinton, her presidential ambitions battered by Mr. Obama's surging fortunes, fought to recast the Democratic race as far from over.
Clinton insiders insisted that momentum would swing back early next month to her bid to be the first woman in the Oval Office, predicting big wins in the delegate-rich states of Ohio and Texas on March 4.
At a Wisconsin automobile plant yesterday, Mr. Obama railed against Washington insiders, a swipe at both Mr. McCain and Ms. Clinton. "The fallout from the housing crisis that's cost jobs and wiped out savings was not an inevitable part of the business cycle, it was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington," he said, although he omitted his usual applause line about forcing better gas mileage standards on U.S. auto makers.
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama speaks at a campaign rally in Racine, Wis., on Wednesday. (Mark Hertzberg/AP)
Related Articles
Internet Links
The Clinton campaign, staggering after eight successive defeats, accused the young, charismatic Illinois senator of avoiding a one-on-one debate on the issues. "Why is Senator Obama hiding from a direct comparison that the Wisconsin voters deserve," the former first lady's spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said in a conference call yesterday.
While Mr. Obama has ignored the increasingly shrill demands for more debates from the Clinton camp, he took a potshot at one of the legacies of Bill Clinton's administration, the North American free-trade agreement. "In the years after her husband signed NAFTA, Senator Clinton would go around talking about how great it was and how many benefits it would bring," Mr. Obama said. He has dismissed NAFTA as a pact that "ships jobs overseas and forces parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wages at the local fast-food joint or at Wal-Mart."
Mr. Obama lumps his rivals together - both cogs, he says, in a broken political system - and never misses a chance to remind voters that he always opposed the war in Iraq.
"It's Washington where politicians like John McCain and Hillary Clinton voted for a war in Iraq that should've never been authorized and never been waged, a war that is costing us thousands of precious lives and billions of dollars a week."
Mr. McCain, 71, shot back, saying the 46-year-old, first-term Democrat has little to espouse but liberal causes and gives rousing speeches devoid of details.
"There is going to come a time when we have to get into specifics, and I've not observed every speech that he's given, obviously, but they are singularly lacking in specifics," Mr. McCain said.
Although former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, the folksy, bass-playing evangelical, continues to poll strongly among the Republican religious right wing, Mr. McCain commands a huge lead in the delegate count and barring a stunningly unexpected development will be the party's presidential standard-bearer.
"Of course I'd like for him to withdraw," Mr. McCain said yesterday. "It would be much easier." But the Republican rivals are both being studiously admiring about the other, unlike the Democratic fight, which threatens to turn nasty.
Ms. Clinton seems intent on trying to drag Mr. Obama into a policy fight. She says that his health-care plan leaves 15 million Americans uninsured. "One of the biggest differences between me and my opponent is that I believe with all my heart that we must have universal health care," Ms. Clinton said.
Her campaign now faces enormous hurdles. It must blunt Mr. Obama's momentum while acknowledging that at least two more losses, in Wisconsin and Hawaii next week, are in the offing. Not until the March 4 primaries in Ohio, home to millions of blue-collar Democrats in struggling rustbelt industries, and Texas, where Latinos form a powerful bloc, does Mrs. Clinton have a credible chance of turning back the Obama tide.
Yesterday, Mark Penn, her chief strategist, explained how Ms. Clinton, 61, can still win and discounted the importance of Mr. Obama's victories in 21 out of 37 contests so far. "In 1976, Jimmy Carter lost 23 states before winning the nomination," he said, adding that former president Mr. Clinton also "lost a string a primaries before clinching the nomination."
But explaining away defeats isn't the same as notching up victories and Ms. Clinton needs some soon.
Even if she wins Ohio, Texas and, the following week, another big state, Pennsylvania, Ms. Clinton would need to rack up 20-percentage-plus margins to regain the lead.
Both Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton are roughly halfway to the 2,025 delegate votes needed to clinch the nomination. The Obama camp is already loudly suggesting that the 794 so-called superdelegates that include Democratic members of Congress, governors and other party notables (including Mr. Clinton) should heed the will of the people and endorse the candidate with the most votes from state primaries. But Ms. Clinton's campaign, which has an edge in declared superdelegates, says it's "not making any distinction between kinds of delegates" and wants them to pick the "best person to be president."
"No one is going to get to 2,025 without superdelegates," Mr. Penn said yesterday, although he stopped short of predicting the battle would end on the convention floor, something that hasn't happened in 40 years.
27
