Obama surpassed Hillary by playing the commitment card (updated: Hillary delegates switch to Obama)

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Wed Feb-20-08 12:27 PM
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Obama surpassed Hillary by playing the commitment card (updated: Hillary delegates switch to Obama)

Edited on Wed Feb-20-08 01:06 PM by ProSense

Zach Brandon: Early work pays off for Obama

David Callender and Judith Davidoff — 2/20/2008 1:57 am

Madison Ald. Zach Brandon admits there were times last year when he felt like the fictional Maytag repairman in his lonely support of a little-known freshman senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.

For months, Brandon was Obama's only backer holding elected office in the state while other top Wisconsin Democrats signed on with the party's anticipated front-runners, Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards.

But on Tuesday, Brandon found himself in very good company as Obama won a commanding 58-42 percent victory over Clinton in the state's Democratic primary. Obama carried 65 of the state's 72 counties, winning by a two-to-one margin in the two biggest, Milwaukee and Dane County, and losing to Clinton only in Adams, Burnett, Douglas, Forest, Juneau, Marinette and Polk counties.

Brandon's new-found friends now include Gov. Jim Doyle, who spent most of the last week campaigning around the state with Obama, as well as Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett -- as well as Obama himself, who is tapping Brandon to help run his campaign in eastern Ohio next month.

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Much of that organizational effort stretched back to last summer, when Brandon and others urged Obama to come to Madison on a side trip from Iowa. The city's potential strategic value was proven when more than 4,000 people paid at least $15 each to hear Obama speak at the Monona Terrace Convention Center in October, Brandon said.

Days late and a few million short: In many respects, the outcome of Tuesday's vote contrasted the difference in approaches between Obama's campaign -- which seamlessly melded Wisconsin volunteers and activists with his national organization and built on eight primary victories earlier this month -- and Clinton's, which often seemed confused and hesitant in a state that twice sent her husband, President Bill Clinton, to the White House.

Many longtime Democratic activists said they didn't understand what Clinton was trying to do here, from her late and relatively few appearances in the state to her attempts to corner Obama into debating her.

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Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton, Clinton's most prominent Wisconsin supporter, defended Clinton's decision to spend only part of her resources on the state.

"Those are very difficult calls to make," said Lawton. "It's a nationwide campaign she's running."

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Obama's commitment fund raising, one donor at a time:

Small Online Contributions Add Up to Huge Fund-Raising Edge for Obama

Senator Barack Obama, who raised a record $36 million in January, most of it online, spoke Tuesday in San Antonio.

By MICHAEL LUO
Published: February 20, 2008

CHICAGO — A cluster of cramped cubicles, tucked away in a rear corner of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters here, serves as the heart of a fund-raising machine that has reshaped the calculus of the 2008 election.

Mr. Obama’s finance director, Julianna Smoot, who has helped him raise more than $150 million so far, does not even have her own office. A Ping-Pong table is the gathering spot for Friday lunches for her team.

The setting, which has the feel of an Internet start-up, is emblematic of how Mr. Obama, of Illinois, has been able to raise so much money. On Wednesday, the Obama campaign will report to the Federal Election Commission that it collected $36 million in January — $4 million more than campaign officials had previously estimated — an unprecedented feat for a single month in American politics that was powered overwhelmingly by small online donations. That dwarfed the $13.5 million in January that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is expected to report Wednesday and the $12 million Senator John McCain’s campaign said he brought in for the month.

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Mr. Obama has done just a few traditional fund-raising events in January and none in February, in contrast to the Clinton campaign, which has been keeping up a steady diet of fund-raisers with either Mrs. Clinton or her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton’s operation has also been pushing to improve its efforts online, with her campaign saying Tuesday that it brought in $15 million over the Internet in February, with donations jumping after news broke that she had lent $5 million to her campaign.

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Out campaigned and out financed, Hillary's campaign managers resorted to doing what they know how to do best: attack and spin:

February 20, 2008, 8:56 am

Lowered Expectations

By TOBIN HARSHAW

“Hillary Clinton has rebounded among Democrats in the Gallup Poll Daily tracking average for Feb. 16-18,” the friendly folk at Gallup inform us. “She is now at 45 percent to Barack Obama’s 46 percent.”

So, she’s got that going for her. Which is nice. Meanwhile, back in the real world, or at least in America’s Dairyland, the post-mortems are chilling.

“The Clinton campaign’s recent negative ad campaign didn’t work,” notes Joe Sudbay at Americablog:

The debate about debates was a dud, and the plagiarism charge went nowhere. But, Clinton is going to have to decide just how ugly she wants the rest of this race to be from here on out. On MSNBC tonight, the painfully pompous pundit Howard Fineman reported that top Clinton staffers think their negative campaigning worked — get this — because she didn’t lose by 25 points.

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And Shaun Mullen at the Moderate Voice raises some good questions:

Having realized however belatedly that her strategy of running as Ms. Inevitable and wrapping up the nomination early while thumbing her nose at states with comparatively few delegates was a disaster, why has she continued to blunder so consistently and so badly?

Why, for example, does Clinton not even have a full slate of delegates for the Pennsylvania primary even through her helpmate, Governor Ed Rendell, ordered a special extension of the deadline in a state that is shaping up to be enormously important to her survival?

Why does she continue to spin every setback as if it was only a matter of demographics, timing, money or plagarism?

Why does she continue to flip-flop on superdelegates and now, in a poke to the electoral eye, reportedly will go after Obama’s pledged delegates?

The answer is that Clinton and her staff, even after a major shakeup, have yet to shed the feeling that she is The Chosen One and their hubris has drowned out the alarm bells that have been ringing so insistently since Obama caught the wind in the run-up to Super Tuesday. The Clinton campaign never had a Plan B and it’s getting awfully late in the day to cobble one together.

Where has Hillary's focus been? It sure isn't Texas or Pennsylvania

What's next for the Hillary campaign? More attacks and more spin:

February 20, 2008, 10:05 am

Clinton Sharpens Her Attack on Obama

By John M. Broder

Striking a harsher new tone as she embarks on a two-week stretch that could revive or break her White House hopes, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton attacked Senator Barack Obama as callow and unprepared to lead.

Speaking at Hunter College in Manhattan on Wednesday morning, Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Obama was running on a thin resume and empty rhetoric.

“It is time to get real,” she said. “To get real about how we actually win this election and get real about the challenges facing America. It’s time we moved from good words to good works, from sound bites to sound solutions.”

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“I am not running for president to put Band-Aids on our problems. I am running to solve them,” she said. The American people, she added, “need a president ready on Day One to be commander in chief of the United States military. They need a president ready to manage our economy and ready to beat the republicans in November.

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Cue the attack machine:

February 20, 2008

'American Leadership Project'

The new pro-Clinton 527, the American Leadership Project, incorporated with the IRS on February 15, and lists as its chief a former Clinton White House deputy press secretary and former Gray Davis aide, Roger Salazar, according to its federal filing.

Jake Tapper has lots of detail, including the consultants working on the spots, and thiis:

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"Ready on day one," well those are "just words."

Edited to add this quote:

Clinton surrogate and Machinists union President Tom Buffenbarger: "Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter."

Wow!