After win Clinton says tide is turning

April 23, 2008 Seizing on Her Primary Win, Clinton Says Tide Is Turning By MICHAEL LUO and PATRICK HEALY Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today seized on her decisive victory over Senator Barack Obama in Pennsylvania to proclaim “the tide is turning” in the Democratic nominating fight, arguing that her performance on Tuesday proved she was best suited to take on Senator John McCain in the fall because of her capacity to carry key swing states. “I won the states that we have to win — Ohio, now Pennsylvania,” she said on CNN in one of six appearances on morning news shows Wednesday. “It’s very hard to imagine a Democrat getting to the White House without winning those states.” Mrs. Clinton won the Pennsylvania popular vote, 55 percent to 45 percent, giving her a critical boost as the she heads into the next nominating contests in North Carolina and Indiana in 13 days. Polls suggest that Mr. Obama is better positioned in those states than he was in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama’s campaign was left struggling to explain on Wednesday why he had once again been unable to leave his opponent on the mat, as well as his troubles gaining the backing of white working-class voters. But Obama campaign officials were able to point to at least one unyielding reality on their side: he still possesses a lead in pledged delegates that will be almost impossible for Mrs. Clinton to erase. In a memo sent to reporters late Tuesday, Bill Burton, Mr. Obama’s national press secretary, called the race “fundamentally unchanged,” meaning that Mrs. Clinton’s victory had done little to help her cut into Mr. Obama’s pledged-delegate lead. The Obama campaign announced early on Wednesday that it had secured another super-delegate endorsement, that of Gov. Brad Henry of Oklahoma, who had previously said he would wait until the convention to make public his choice. Mrs. Clinton’s victory in Pennsylvania indeed did little to close the pledged-delegate gap. It yielded her at least 80 pledged delegates, compared with at least 66 for Mr. Obama, with 12 still to be awarded, according to the Associated Press. David Plouffe, the campaign manager for Mr. Obama, said on Wednesday that while the final breakdown of delegates from Pennsylvania was not yet complete, he too projected that Mrs. Clinton would have a net gain of about 12 pledged delegates from her victory, whittling Mr. Obama’s overall lead to about 159 pledged delegates by the campaign’s calculation. A total of 187 delegates are at stake in the next big primaries on May 6. “We don’t believe that the structure of the race is going to change,” Mr. Plouffe said. In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Plouffe sought to dismiss concerns about how Mr. Obama would fare against Mr. McCain. He ticked through a list of states where polls indicated Mr. Obama was a stronger opponent than Mrs. Clinton in facing Republicans. “We think this is a flawed exercise, to somehow suggest that performance in primaries is a leading indicator or what would happen in a general election,” Mr. Plouffe said. He added that Mr. Obama had a high favorability rating among Democrats who supported Mrs. Clinton. In making her case today, though, Mrs. Clinton pointed to the popular vote totals and contended that, counting those cast in the Florida and Michigan primaries, she had now garnered more primary votes than any previous Democratic nominee. But both candidates were barred from campaigning in the Florida and Michigan contests, and Mr. Obama’s name was not on the ballot in Michigan, because the states moved up their primary dates against the national party’s wishes. The states’ convention delegates were stripped by the Democratic National Committee. As the race moves to Indiana and North Carolina, much of the immediate focus in the Clinton campaign is on scrounging for cash to combat what has been a widening disparity in resources with the Obama campaign. In Indiana, where polls show a toss-up at this point, Mr. Obama has spent more than three times as much as Mrs. Clinton on television advertising so far; in North Carolina, where Mr. Obama is leading by a significant margin in polls, his spending on TV ads has been more than double hers. During her television interviews Wednesday morning, Mrs. Clinton took pains to mention her web site, as she did the night before in her victory speech, saying that her campaign had brought in over $3 million online overnight. That would seem to prime the campaign for its best 24 hours of online fundraising to date, exceeding the $4 million it brought in after the news broke following the Feb. 5 nominating contests that she had loaned $5 million to her campaign. The campaign is scrambling to take advantage of the spike in contributions, transforming its home page into a donation page, something it had experimented with for the first time on several days last month. Mrs. Clinton also defended herself against criticism that her attacks on Mr. Obama have engendered a negative tone in the race that is damaging to the Democrats’ prospects in November. She said the current contest had been decidedly mild compared to past races. “Everybody is going to compare and contrast,” she said on MSNBC. “I think that is part of the way campaigns are run.” With the pitched battle for the Democratic presidential nomination now set to rage on at least through the May 6 primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, its harshening tone has become an issue for many party leaders. Appearing on MSNBC, Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts urged Mr. Obama, who he is backing, to avoid negative campaigning in favor of “a compelling vision that unifies people.” He said the American public is “not well served” by campaign tactics that seek to diminish an opponent. For their part, the North Carolina Republican Party is planning to roll out a television advertisement on Monday that attacks a pair of Democrats running for governor in the state for endorsing Senator Barack Obama. The ad includes a video clip of Mr. Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, excoriating the United States. The release of the commercial, which Republican officials said would first be seen during 6 p.m. newscasts in the state on Monday, injects a potentially divisive racial element into the state’s primary. Mrs. Clinton faces major challenges going forward. Her campaign had essentially run out of money before the overnight spike in contributions, with a pile of unpaid bills, and she faces growing frustration among some Democratic officials, who would that she quit the field in light of Mr. Obama’s overall lead. Mrs. Clinton’s victory was propelled by her strong performance among women, older voters and less affluent and less educated voters; among white union members with no college education, she won almost three-quarters of the vote, polling showed. Speaking to supporters in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, Mrs. Clinton emphasized that she had triumphed despite trailing Mr. Obama financially. “He broke every spending record in this state trying to knock us out of this race,” she said. “Well, the people of Pennsylvania had other ideas.” Still, she said in calling for more donations, “we can only keep winning if we can keep competing with an opponent who outspends us so massively.” Amid chants of “Yes she can” — a riposte to Mr. Obama’s motto, “Yes we can” — Mrs. Clinton described herself as “a president who is ready to lead on Day One — that means ready to take charge as commander in chief and make this economy work for middle class families — and I thank you, I thank you Pennsylvania, for deciding I can be that president.” Mr. Obama congratulated his opponent at a Tuesday night rally in Evansville, Ind. But he also implicitly chided Mrs. Clinton for the negative tone of her attacks over the past week — and, tacitly, acknowledged his own missteps. “It’s easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit-for-tat that consumes our politics, the bickering that none of us are entirely immune to,” he said. “That trivializes the profound issues — two wars, an economy in recession, a planet in peril.” He added that Americans “believe that the challenges we face are bigger than the smallness of our politics.” Chief among the challenges facing Mrs. Clinton, besides paying bills and financing new advertising, was persuading impatient Democratic superdelegates — party leaders and elected officials — to at least remain neutral in the contest and let the remaining primaries play out through early June. The Pennsylvania Democrats who cast their ballots in Tuesday’s primary did so with the economy weighing heavily on their minds, according to surveys of voters leaving polling places. Those surveys showed that more than half the voters questioned believe that the worsening state of the American economy is the most important issue confronting the country, with about 90 percent saying the United States has already slipped into a recession. Half of those polled also said that they were looking for a candidate who could bring about change, which has been the main theme of Mr. Obama’s campaign. Mr. Obama leads in delegates, but has consistently trailed Mrs. Clinton in polls taken in Pennsylvania, though the gap had been closing in recent days. About one-quarter of those who participated in the exit polling, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for five television networks and The Associated Press, endorsed the idea that experience, which Mrs. Clinton has emphasized in her campaign, is the most important quality to be sought in a candidate. For the polling, the margin of sampling error in the sample of 40 precincts across the state was plus or minus four percentage points. Both candidates performed strongly among the same constituencies that have supported them in other primary states. Mr. Obama was backed overwhelmingly by black voters, and also scored well among voters younger than 45 and among college graduates, the results show. Geographically, he performed best in Philadelphia and its suburbs, which has the largest concentration of population in Pennsylvania, while Mrs. Clinton won the majority of the vote in the rest of the state. Just as a loss in Pennsylvania would probably have ended her campaign, Indiana poses another make-or-break challenge for Mrs. Clinton, according to several of her advisers, who said that they would urge her to quit the race if she lost that state. Mrs. Clinton, former President Bill Clinton and their allies have campaigned frequently in Indiana in recent weeks, and she has obtained some important endorsements there, including support from Senator Evan Bayh, the state’s former governor. “She has to win Pennsylvania and Indiana — pretty much everyone in the campaign agrees on that,” said one senior Clinton adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the campaign’s electoral expectations. But Clinton advisers emphasized that neither they nor Mrs. Clinton were feeling anything close to defeatist — rather, they said, they believed that a Pennsylvania win would help her build momentum in Indiana and other states in the region with coming contests, like West Virginia and Kentucky in May. Clinton advisers said they were already picking states, cities and towns where they would dispatch staff members and volunteers from Pennsylvania, and were budgeting for television advertising. They are also planning a busy travel schedule for the Clintons, for their daughter, Chelsea, and for an army of surrogates. They are expected to focus heavily on Indiana, and to a lesser extent in North Carolina, where Mr. Obama is widely seen as strong. A greater concern in the shorter term for Mrs. Clinton is fundraising: She raised $21 million in March, compared with Mr. Obama’s $42 million. In the latest campaign finance filings, Mrs. Clinton reported $10.3 million in outstanding primary debts but only $9.5 million available to cover them, leaving an $800,000 shortfall at the end of March. In February, the Clinton campaign had a $3 million surplus. By comparison, Mr. Obama had $43 million in cash for the coming primaries and a campaign debt of less than $660,000 at the end of March. Mr. Obama is spending 75 cents for every dollar he is taking in; Mrs. Clinton is spending $1.10. Michael M. Grynbaum, John Holusha and Jeff Zeleny

MLC comment:

I've heard the spin coming from Barack Obama's team and his flunkies in the media, well he cut into a 20 point lead yeah I guess you would too if you broke state primary spending records. The point is he outspent Hillary 3 to 1 and still lost by 10 points. I'm not saying I won't support him if he gets the nod but Dems gotta ask themselves alot of questions about him.