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Clinton Defeats Obama in Ohio Primary; McCain Clinches Race as Foe Concedes •
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In Two Battlegrounds, Voters Say, Not Yet
By Patrick Healy
The New York Times
Wednesday 05 March 2008
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's victories in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday
night not only shook off the vapors of impending defeat, but also showed that
- in spite of his delegate lead - Senator Barack Obama was still
losing to her in the big states.
Those two states were the battlegrounds where Mr. Obama was going to bury the
last opponent to his history-making nomination, finally delivering on his message
of hope while dashing the hopes of a Clinton presidential dynasty.
Yet then the excited, divided American electorate weighed in once more, throwing
Mrs. Clinton the sort of political lifeline that New Hampshire did in early
January after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.
For Mrs. Clinton, the battle ahead is not so much against Mr. Obama as it is
against a Democratic Party establishment that had once been ready to coalesce
behind her but has been drifting toward Mr. Obama. The party wants a standard-bearer
now to wage the war against the newly minted leader of the Republicans, Senator
John McCain, who enjoys a head start with every day that the Democrats lack
a nominee of their own.
Clinton advisers said her decisive victory in Ohio and her narrow one in Texas
- where exit polls showed her winning the votes of women, whites and Hispanics
in an extremely close race - were more than enough to argue that she should
go forward to the April 22 primary in the Ohio-esque Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,
even if Mr. Obama has more delegates after Tuesday night.
Mr. Obama, meanwhile, appeared likely to accumulate enough delegates from Texas
and Ohio (as well as from his victory in Vermont) to strengthen his mathematical
edge for the nomination and portray Mrs. Clinton as a spoiler to a unified party.
Yet the results on Tuesday also bring fresh questions about his electability
in crucial swing states like Ohio that Democrats are eager to carry in the November
election.
"Hillary is very much in the game," Patti Solis Doyle, Mrs. Clinton's
former campaign manager, said on Tuesday night.
Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, brimmed with equal brio. "This was her
last, best chance to significantly close the gap in pledged delegates,"
Mr. Burton said of Mrs. Clinton, who began the night with about 50 fewer pledged
delegates and 100 fewer over all. "They have failed."
Mrs. Clinton spent much of 2007 running as the candidate of the Democratic
establishment - racking up endorsements from party leaders, enlisting
major party donors from past presidential campaigns and setting up bases of
operations in populous states like California and Florida.
But after losing momentum to Mr. Obama in February, she is now viewed by many
party leaders as an obstacle to the fight ahead - even as she continues
to argue that she is the best candidate, by dint of her experience, to carry
the party's flag into the "wartime election" fight against
a Vietnam hero and national security pro like Mr. McCain.
Mrs. Clinton's advisers say there is no party elder who has the stature
or power to pressure her to bow out, aside from her husband, former President
Bill Clinton. And he more than anyone wants her to keep running.
The nomination is not determined by the number of states won, but Mr. Obama's
inability to win major battleground states beyond Missouri, Minnesota, Wisconsin,
and his home state, Illinois, is a concern of some Democrats - especially
since Ohio and Florida have become must-wins in presidential elections.
Mrs. Clinton has been enjoying her first real burst of momentum lately, thanks
to her new advertisements and speeches questioning Mr. Obama's abilities
in a crisis, raising the fact that he has not convened his Senate subcommittee
to hold hearings on the Afghanistan war. A potentially embarrassing trial of
a former Obama friend and contributor has begun. And major Clinton fund-raisers
said that one big victory on Tuesday night would be enough to energize donors
and keep $1 million or more flowing in daily.
"Each time people think we're down, like after Iowa, or South Carolina,
or the February primaries, Hillary has found ways to come back up," said
Jonathan Mantz, the national finance director of the Clinton campaign.
The results will also embolden her campaign's efforts to persuade the
Democratic Party to factor in the delegates from Florida and Michigan, her advisers
say. The party counted out those states after they moved up their primaries;
Mrs. Clinton stayed on the ballot in both and "won" them in January
- despite having no real competition in Michigan and no real campaign
in Florida. In a sign of her thinking, She shouted out to them in her Ohio victory
speech Tuesday night.
"If we want a Democratic president, we need a Democratic nominee who
can win the battleground states, just like Ohio," she said. "We've
won Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire, Arkansas,
California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Tennessee!"
But for all the millions of votes Mrs. Clinton has now won, simple math is
still her enemy. She needs to use Tuesday night to persuade superdelegates -
the hundreds of party leaders who have a vote on the nomination - to stop
abandoning her. Or, at least, stop long enough for Mrs. Clinton to damage him
with a line of attack, goad him into a colossal gaffe (or watch him make one
on his own) or rely on the media to unearth a campaign-altering scandal about
him.
But it is not clear if Ohio and Texas were enough to give Mrs. Clinton -
a politician who has been a known quantity for 16 years- a real chance
for a fresh assessment by the many superdelegates who know her well.
"The great irony is, she is now the 'hope' candidate,"
said Dan Gerstein, a Democratic strategist who backs Mr. Obama. "She can
only hope to catch some breaks and catch Obama stumbling."
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Clinton Defeats Obama in Ohio Primary; McCain Clinches Race as Foe
Concedes
By Adam Nagourney
The New York Times
Wednesday 05 March 2008
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton defeated Senator Barack Obama in the Ohio and
Texas primaries on Tuesday, ending a string of defeats and allowing her to soldier
on in a Democratic presidential nomination race that now seems unlikely to end
any time soon.
Mrs. Clinton also won Rhode Island, while Mr. Obama won in Vermont. But the
results mean that Mrs. Clinton won the two states she most needed to keep her
candidacy alive. Her victory in Texas was razor thin and came early Wednesday
morning after most Americans had gone to bed. But by winning decisively in Ohio
earlier in the night, Mrs. Clinton was able to deliver a televised victory speech
in time for the late-night news. And the result there allowed her to cast Tuesday
as the beginning of a comeback even though she stood a good chance of gaining
no ground against Mr. Obama in the hunt for delegates.
"No candidate in recent history - Democratic or Republican -
has won the White House without winning the Ohio primary," Mrs. Clinton,
of New York, said at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. "We all know that if we
want a Democratic president, we need a Democratic nominee who can win Democratic
states just like Ohio."
Although Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote in Texas, her hunt for delegates
was complicated by the state's peculiar nominating process, which includes
a separate caucus that awards 35 percent of the state's delegates, irrespective
of the primary results. Mr. Obama held a slight lead in that contest with less
than half of precincts reporting, but the outcome is likely to stay up in the
air until later on Wednesday.
The Associated Press reported that all told, Mr. Obama retains his lead in
the delegate count, with 1,477 pledged delegates compared to Mrs. Clinton's
1,391. The A.P. said that 170 delegates from Tuesday's contests have yet
to be assigned, many from the Texas caucuses.
On the Republican side, Senator John McCain swept to victory in Ohio, Rhode
Island, Texas and Vermont and claimed his party's nomination, capping
a remarkable comeback in his second bid for the presidency.
Mr. McCain's main remaining rival, Mike Huckabee, a former governor of
Arkansas, announced he was dropping out minutes after the polls closed and pledged
his cooperation to Mr. McCain. Aides to Mr. McCain said he would head Wednesday
morning to Washington to go to the White House and accept the endorsement of
President Bush, his one-time foe, and begin gathering his party around him.
Mr. McCain, of Arizona, delivered his victory speech in subdued tones to a
boisterous crowd of supporters in Dallas.
"Now, we begin the most important part of our campaign," he said,
"to make a respectful, determined and convincing case to the American
people that our campaign and my election as president, given the alternatives
presented by our friends in the other party, are in the best interests of the
country we love."
Mr. McCain proceeded to offer a preview of attacks for his Democratic rival.
"I will leave it to my opponent to propose returning to the failed, big-government
mandates of the '60s and '70s to address problems such as the lack
of health care insurance for some Americans," he said. "I will campaign
to make health care more accessible to more Americans with reforms that will
bring down costs in the health care industry without ruining the quality of
the world's best medical care."
Mrs. Clinton's twin victories in Ohio and Texas gave her, at the least,
a psychological boost after a tough month in which she watched Mr. Obama, of
Illinois, roll up victory after victory and build a lead in delegates. There
was virtually no chance that Mrs. Clinton could have survived had she lost Ohio
and Texas; her husband, former President Bill Clinton, said last month that
his wife needed to win both states.
Mrs. Clinton is already planning ways to capitalize on her performance; she
is scheduled to appear Wednesday on all the morning news programs. But she will
continue to find herself in a difficult position mathematically. Given the way
the Democratic Party allocates delegates, it remained unclear whether Mrs. Clinton
would close Mr. Obama's lead on that front.
Even before the polls closed, Mr. Obama's aides said that given their
lead in delegates over Mrs. Clinton, it was not possible for her to catch up
in the few remaining contests.
Mr. Obama came out shortly before midnight to speak to a crowd in San Antonio,
and laid out the argument his campaign would make in the days ahead.
"No matter what happens tonight," he said, "we have nearly
the same delegate lead that we did this morning, and we are on our way to winning
this nomination."
But Mrs. Clinton's supporters, exultant over the victory, tried to cast
the results in Ohio and Texas as a turning point.
Mrs. Clinton took the stage in Columbus before a sea of waving white-and-blue
"Hillary" signs and immediately portrayed her victory in Ohio as
an indication of her electability in a general election. And she reprised a
line of criticism against Mr. Obama that appeared to have gained her some traction
in this contest.
"Americans don't need more promises," she said. "They've
heard plenty of speeches. They deserve solutions, and they deserve them now."
As she spoke, the crowd responded with chants of "Yes, she will!"
- apparently an orchestrated response to Mr. Obama's trademark "Yes,
we can!"
Turning one of Mr. Obama's themes against him, she said, "Together,
we will turn promises into action, words into solutions and hope into reality."
The results left the two parties at very different stages of the race. Mr.
McCain's nomination has been all but assured for almost a month. His campaign
looked to the results on Tuesday as an opportunity to begin framing the contest
ahead. In contrast to his previous victory speeches, Mr. McCain made no mention
of Mr. Obama, presumably because the result when he spoke was hardly clear.
Nonetheless, Mr. Obama called Mr. McCain at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday from his hotel
room in San Antonio to congratulate him and to say he looked forward to running
against him, said Mr. Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs. Mrs. Clinton
said much the same in her speech.
The voting proceeded on a day of problems at the polls in both states, in part
because of a recurrence of the huge turnouts that almost every contest to date
has experienced. In Ohio, the Obama campaign asked a judge on Tuesday to keep
polls open longer in Cuyahoga County because of paper ballot shortages.
The Texas vote was actually two contests: a primary, where two-thirds of the
delegates were selected, followed by a caucus, where the remaining one-third
were selected. The Clinton campaign claimed irregularities by Mr. Obama's
supporters who, Mrs. Clinton's aides said, sought to gain improper advantage
in the caucuses.
In an illustration of the tension between the two campaigns, Bob Bauer, an
election lawyer for Mr. Obama, called into a conference call arranged by the
Clinton campaign. The call had been set up to discuss the Texas caucuses, and
Mr. Bauer challenged the assertions being made by Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton's
communications director. The men, referring to each other by first names, engaged
in a testy seven-minute exchange.
For Democrats, and particularly for Mrs. Clinton, the contests were as consequential
as any to date. To that end, Mrs. Clinton delivered some of the toughest attacks
of her campaign over the weekend, including a television advertisement in Texas
that challenged Mr. Obama's national security credentials and attacks
on Mr. Obama in Ohio over free trade and a meeting his economic adviser had
with a Canadian diplomat about the North American Free Trade Agreement.
There was evidence that the attacks had some effects. Mrs. Clinton did well
among the 20 percent of voters in both states who said they made their decision
in the last three days. She won about 60 percent of those voters in Texas and
about 55 percent of those who voted in Ohio, according to exit polls conducted
statewide by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool.
Surveys of voters leaving the polls showed Mrs. Clinton doing well among Hispanics
in Texas, a major target for her there, as well as among lower-income voters
and women in Ohio, suggesting that she was reassembling the coalition that had
broken down in her losing 11 straight state contests to Mr. Obama over the past
month. Mr. Obama was showing strength among black voters who made up 20 percent
of the Democratic electorate in both states.
In Ohio, Mrs. Clinton's emphasis on economic issues helped her to some
extent. Three-quarters of respondents said they were concerned about their families'
financial situation, and more than half of those voted for Mrs. Clinton. She
also won a majority of union households in Ohio and, in a reversal of her standing
in early races, won decisively among white men.
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Marjorie Connelly, Megan Thee and Michael M. Grynbaum contributed
reporting from New York, and John M. Broder from Columbus, Ohio.
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