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Obama's march getting harder for Hillary to stop

BY CRAIG GORDON | craig.gordon@newsday.com

February 13, 2008

WASHINGTON - It's not just that she keeps getting beat.

Hillary Clinton's getting clobbered, losing again to Barack Obama last night by stunning margins in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Obama's wins give him only a small edge in the all-important delegate math. But, make no mistake, he is opening up a massive lead in the intangibles - like enthusiasm, energy and just looking like a winner - that sets him on a course toward the nomination that is getting harder for Clinton to stop.

"The reality here is that it's beginning to solidify more in Obama's direction," said Democratic strategist Bill Carrick. "This sort of sense that she could turn everything around instantly - this Indiana Jones routine where you save yourself right at the end - I just don't know that that's true."

On the Republican side, John McCain survived a scare from Mike Huckabee to take Virginia, though far more narrowly than polls had suggested - a further sign of conservative discontent with McCain that will pester him as long as Huckabee stays in the race.

McCain won in Maryland and the District, enough to give him a near-mathematical lock on the nomination, but any hopes he had of dispensing with Huckabee were complicated by the former Arkansas governor's late surge in Virginia.

For Clinton, last night's results were a dramatic comedown from her days as the undisputed front-runner, but they weren't a complete surprise. She had hinted at losing all three and already staked her hopes on March 4 races in Ohio and Texas.

But the breadth of Obama's victories showed that something was shifting unmistakably in the campaign, that the coalition Clinton had used to fight Obama to a tie on Super Tuesday is crumbling right when she needs it most.

If Obama can replicate some of the numbers he achieved last night in Virginia - beating Clinton handily among women and voters making less than $50,000, two previously reliable pro-Clinton voting blocs - it's hard to see how she can deny him the nomination.

Beyond the numbers, there was also a sense of two campaigns going in opposite directions - with the one who expected to have the whole thing wrapped up on Super Tuesday seeming flat-footed and exhausted, riven by money woes and a new top-level departure.

At the same time, the insurgent Obama campaign always knew the only way to beat Clinton would be a long slog through the primaries, and he now just seems fresher, better positioned for the stretch run.

One thing Clinton has going for her is that March 4 is a long way off - 20 days, an eternity in politics. "If she can hold it together, and take advantage of the nature of the Democratic coalitions in those states, she could come out in the spring even, she could be slightly ahead," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.

The irony, of course, is that Clinton now is sounding a little like another famous New York politician - Rudy Giuliani, who kept telling voters to wait until Florida, wait until Florida.

Of course, it didn't work out too well for Giuliani, whose presidential dreams died there. Clinton has to hope Ohio and Texas will be kinder - but last night suggested they might not.

"We're seeing a lot of people vote from all different parts of the country who express pretty much the same opinion about who the Democratic nominee should be," Carrick said of Obama, "and I think it's going to be very difficult to reverse that."

Yesterday's vote

D.C. primary

DEMS

15 delegates results as of 11:45 p.m.

98% of precincts reporting