Obama Erodes Clinton’s Core Vote as Democrat Deadlock is Broken
by Leonard Doyle
With eight straight victories in a row, Barack Obama has streaked ahead of his rival Hillary Clinton in his once unlikely campaign to become the next Democratic challenger for the US presidency.
The focus of the campaign now moves to Wisconsin, and to Hawaii where Mr Obama was born to a Kenyan father and a white mother 46 years ago. The media frenzy surrounding his race for the White House is now such that anything less than a crushing defeat of his opponent in these contests next Tuesday will be viewed as a stumble.
Yesterday Mr Obama received another boost when Bill Clinton’s campaign chairman from 1992 endorsed him. David Wilhem is sased in Wisconsin and is a so called ’super-delegate’’s so his backing is more than symbolic. Mr Obama meanwhile condemned attacked Mrs Clinton and the republicans over the economy saying, “we are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control,” but that “It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington - the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy.”
By overwhelming Mrs Clinton on Tuesday in Virginia, Maryland and Washington DC, the so-called Potomac primaries, Mr Obama captured impressive support from every group of voters. In winning the backing of women, he removed one of the last important bulwarks propping up the Clinton campaign. Mr Obama won 75 per cent of the vote in Washington, DC, and nearly two-thirds in Virginia. In Maryland, he took almost 60 per cent of the vote.
All day yesterday, political commentators bubbled over with praise for the Obama campaign, noting that he has tapped into an insistent popular demand for change in Washington. His call for wholesale change in the way Washington politicians are funded by and do deals with industry lobbyists and insiders has resonated with Americans facing growing unemployment, falling incomes and an insecure economic future. They support his demands for a change far more profound than merely finding a Democratic Party replacement for the unpopular George Bush.
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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/14/7067/