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Wisconsin and Hawaii Hand Victories to Obama
By Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny
The New York Times
Wednesday 20 February 2008
Senator Barack Obama decisively beat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the
Wisconsin primary and the Hawaii caucuses on Tuesday night, accelerating his
momentum ahead of crucial primaries in Ohio and Texas and cutting into Mrs.
Clinton's support among women and union members.
With the two rivals now battling state by state over margins of victory and
allotment of delegates, surveys of voters leaving the Wisconsin polls showed
Mr. Obama, of Illinois, making new inroads with those two groups as well as
middle-age voters and continuing to win support from white men and younger voters
- a performance that yielded grim tidings for Mrs. Clinton, of New York.
On the Republican side, Senator John McCain of Arizona won a commanding victory
over Mike Huckabee in the Wisconsin contest and led by a wide margin in Washington
State. All but assured of his party's nomination, Mr. McCain immediately
went after Mr. Obama during a rally in Ohio, deriding "eloquent but empty"
calls for change.
For Mr. Obama, Hawaii was his 10th consecutive victory, a streak in which he
has not only run up big margins in many states but also pulled votes from once-stalwart
supporters of Mrs. Clinton, like low- and middle-income people and women.
Mrs. Clinton wasted no time in signaling that she would now take a tougher
line against Mr. Obama - a recognition, her advisers said, that she must
act to alter the course of the campaign and define Mr. Obama on her terms.
In a speech in Ohio shortly after the polls closed in Wisconsin, she alluded
to what her campaign considers Mr. Obama's lack of experience, and his
support for a health insurance plan that would not initially seek to cover all
Americans.
"This is the choice we face: One of us is ready to be commander in chief
in a dangerous world," Mrs. Clinton said in the remarks, which she also
planned to expand upon in a speech in New York City on Wednesday. "One
of us has faced serious Republican opposition in the past - and one of
us is ready to do it again." Mrs. Clinton did not mention the Wisconsin
results; she did, however, call Mr. Obama to congratulate him on the victory.
As Mrs. Clinton was speaking, Mr. Obama appeared on stage at a rally in Texas,
effectively cutting her off as cable television networks dropped her in midsentence,
a telling sign of the showmanship power of a front-runner.
"Houston, I think we achieved liftoff here," Mr. Obama told a crowd
of 20,000 people in that city as he hailed the voters of Wisconsin. "The
change we seek is still months and miles away, and we need the good people of
Texas to help us get there."
With 90 percent of the electoral precincts in Wisconsin reporting, Mr. Obama
had 58 percent of the vote to Mrs. Clinton's 41 percent. On the Republican
side, Mr. McCain had 55 percent to Mr. Huckabee's 37 percent. And early
returns in Washington State showed him with 48 percent of the vote to Mr. Huckabee's
21 percent. In Hawaii, Mr. Obama had 75 percent of the vote, with 71 of precincts
reporting, while Mrs. Clinton had 24 percent.
In Wisconsin, the survey of voters leaving the polls found that Democrats believed
Mr. Obama would be more likely than Mrs. Clinton, by 63 percent to 37 percent,
to defeat the Republican nominee in the fall.
Her latest losses narrowed even further Mrs. Clinton's options and leaves
her little, if any, room for error. Her road to victory is now a cliff walk.
By the calculation of her own aides, she now almost certainly will need to
win the next two big contests, Texas and Ohio on March 4, as well as Pennsylvania
on April 22 in order to maintain a viable claim to the nomination and stop so-called
superdelegates from breaking for Mr. Obama. But there has been evidence this
month that Mr. Obama is building momentum with each victory, and recent polls
have suggested that Mrs. Clinton's once-large lead in Ohio and Texas is
shrinking.
What is more, it may not be enough at this point for Mrs. Clinton to simply
win Ohio and Texas. She needs delegates to catch up with Mr. Obama; under the
rules by which the Democratic Party allocates delegates, she will need to win
double-digit victories to pick up enough delegates to close the gap.
Finally, Mrs. Clinton continues to struggle to find a way to try to raise questions
about Mr. Obama and stop what has been a rush of voters to his side. Her Tuesday
night speech about Mr. Obama's experience level was one of her toughest
yet; still, she has been making similar arguments for months now, and they have
not caught fire thus far.
With his Wisconsin victory, Mr. Obama moved into a lead over Mrs. Clinton in
delegates; going into the vote, he had 1,078 delegates to Mrs. Clinton's
1,081, according to a count by The New York Times. Wisconsin had 74 pledged
delegates in play, while Hawaii had 20 pledged delegates.
Although Wisconsin borders Mr. Obama's home state, Illinois, the primary
presented a challenge because of the large share of blue-collar workers, a group
that he has struggled to win over. Yet the results represented a turnaround
for Mr. Obama: About one-third of voters in the Democratic primary came from
union households, and they split their votes evenly between Mrs. Clinton and
Mr. Obama, according to a statewide exit poll conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for
the National Election Pool.
By contrast, in the Feb. 5 primaries in New Jersey and California, two states
Mrs. Clinton won, the percentage of Democratic voters from union households
was also about one-third of those surveyed by Edison/Mitofsky, but they supported
Mrs. Clinton more strongly than in Wisconsin.
About 6 in 10 white men voted for Mr. Obama, while white women split evenly
between him and Mrs. Clinton, the polls showed. Mrs. Clinton turned in another
strong performance with voters over the age of 60, meanwhile.
In forging ahead, Clinton advisers say she is determined to win strongly among
women and union members in Ohio and Texas, and cited a number of factors that
they were counting on: Mrs. Clinton's performance in televised debates
in each state this month, including one in Texas on Thursday; her increasingly
populist message at campaign rallies; attacks by her and her advisers on Mr.
Obama's authenticity; and her continuing portrayal of him as inexperienced.
On the Republican side, Mr. McCain declared victory in Wisconsin shortly after
the polls closed and continued rolling past his last major challenger, Mr. Huckabee,
toward the goal of winning the 1,191 delegates needed to seal the party's
nomination.
But surveys of voters gave evidence of misgivings about his candidacy: more
than 4 in 10 voters said Mr. McCain was not conservative enough; conservative
voters split their votes evenly between the two men. And Mr. Huckabee won a
majority of the vote of the one-third of evangelical voters who participated
in the Republican primary.
Addressing a packed ballroom in Columbus, Ohio, Mr. McCain said to cheers that
he would urge the nation not to be "deceived by an eloquent but empty
call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history" and
warned against risking "the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate."
He did not even allude to Mrs. Clinton.
Both Democrats have been increasingly sounding populist notes recently to reflect
the economic concerns of voters. In her remarks in Youngstown on Tuesday night,
Mrs. Clinton allied herself with Americans working on the "night shift"
- a phrase that is also the title of a new advertisement that began running
in Ohio on Tuesday night. The ad ends with an image of Mrs. Clinton doing paperwork,
illuminated by a lamp, as a narrator says, "She's worked the night
shift, too."
While Mrs. Clinton drew some of her largest crowds to date in Texas, her decision
to spend time away from Wisconsin troubled some of her supporters, who believed
she had erred in not campaigning enough in states she lost recently, like Maine.
Mr. Obama's audiences, meanwhile, were filled with a tapestry of supporters
- young and old, black and white - many of whom said they had been
following the presidential race as it unfolded in neighboring states like Iowa.
Mary Liedtke, a defense lawyer in Eau Claire, Wis., said she had been a supporter
of Mrs. Clinton. But in the final weeks of the Iowa caucus campaign, she said
she had become inspired by Mr. Obama's supporters.
"Some elderly women I've heard say, 'I want to see a woman
president before I die,' and I know that's why some of them are
supporting Hillary," Ms. Liedtke said in an interview after seeing Mr.
Obama last weekend in her town.
"But you know what? That's a selfish reason to vote for a president
just because you want to see a woman before you die," she added. "What
about the kids coming up? I feel we should vote for the young people."
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John M. Broder contributed reporting from Ohio, and Megan Thee from
New York.
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