Can Obama Capitalize On Big Victories?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, BarackSure, he won overwhelmingly, but what do these victories really mean?
Ben Smith thinks they could break open the floodgates. From Politico:
The results in Washington and Nebraska vindicated Obama’s strategy of preparing expensive efforts to organize votes after the Feb. 5 contests that many expected — wrongly — effectively to decide the race. Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, played down its own efforts in the states, though she did air television ads in both Washington and Nebraska.Obama also won in Louisiana, buoyed by taking nearly 90 percent of the support of black voters, according to exit polls. And he won overwhelmingly in the U.S. Virgin Islands, winning all three of the territory’s pledged delegates.
In squeezing every delegate out of the small and mid-sized states between now and March 4, and every dollar out of his supporters, Obama is hoping to build a head of steam this month that will make him unstoppable and will lure free-floating superdelegates to his camp.
Clinton, meanwhile, aims to keep the debate national in scope and sharply competitive in the national media, if not on the ground in the primary states.
Honestly, I don’t think Clinton’s strategy is going to play with the nation as a whole. People will see a bunch of Obama wins racking up and wondering why Hillary isn’t competing.
Of course, I think she’s probably competing a lot harder than she’s letting on, but it’s all about the expectations game (for some weird reason) and if she can keep them low, she may be able to ride it out.
Sully sums it up…
He hasn’t just out-dreamed her. He has out-campaigned her.
And that’s the thing. I don’t think ANYBODY can claim that Clinton has out campaigned Obama. And for somebody with a funny name and virtually no name recognition outside of the blogosphere a little over 2 years ago, is this not an incredibly impressive feat?
Basically, if these are the types of results this guy can run in a very short amount of time, I’d be very interested to see what he could with 4 years in the White House.
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 10th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
I’m feeling quite confident that Obama is going to win the Dem. nomination. Of course, I’ve been wrong before.