SUPPORT FOR CLINTON WANES AS OBAMA SEES FINISH LINE (Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times) As adamant as Mrs. Clinton appeared on Wednesday, several advisers said that how long she would stay in the race was an open question. Some top Clinton fund-raisers said that the campaign was all but over and suggested that she was simply buying time on Wednesday to determine if she could raise enough money and still win over superdelegates, the elected officials and party leaders who could essentially hand Mr. Obama the nomination… Other advisers said in interviews that her campaign was nearly out of cash, raising questions about what kind of campaign she can continue to run… Clinton advisers said they were concerned that the candidate’s online fund-raising, which boomed after her victory in the Ohio primary in March and in Pennsylvania in April, had slowed by comparison on Tuesday night and Wednesday, and that her donor base was either tightening somewhat or playing wait-and-see, despite her public appeal for money on Tuesday night… One Clinton adviser said the campaign was struggling to arrange meetings with large numbers of uncommitted superdelegates. This adviser said that at least a few superdelegates might not want to meet with Mrs. Clinton because they did not want to hear another pitch or because they had all but decided to go with Mr. Obama.
MORE: Democrats Seek Graceful Exit for Hillary Clinton (Los Angeles Times) Dogged by defections and signs of financial trouble, Hillary Rodham Clinton faced a significant shift Wednesday even among supporters as talk turned from how she might win to how she can end her presidential campaign gracefully.
EVEN MORE: Hillary’s Strategy of Last Resort (Los Angeles Times) Unable to revive her presidential campaign at the polls, Hillary Rodham Clinton now envisions a road to the nomination built on disputes over Democratic Party rules and fights over delegate selections. But on Wednesday even that route looked unattainable, with some key party officials warning that they would not cooperate with Clinton’s strategy.
THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM: Clinton Spurns Calls to Quit Race (Washington Post) Another Clinton adviser said that there is at best a 10 percent chance that she will end her candidacy before the last primaries, on June 3. Privately, however, several advisers acknowledged that her route to the nomination has become far more difficult as a result of Tuesday’s voting. “It’s narrowed,” said one adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. This adviser said the fundamentals of the race had not changed as much as perceptions of Obama’s prospects for winning. “It’s just that the atmosphere shifted, as it shifted in her favor coming out of Ohio and again after Pennsylvania,” the adviser said. “It’s shifted back. Not to where it was pre-Ohio, but there’s been a substantial shift back.” Garin said the real change is in the commentary about the race. “I think that there are pundits who think she should get out,” he said. “She has faced those calls before and has continued onward.”
OBAMA’S GOT A CONFIDENT NEW STRATEGY (Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times) Barack Obama hasn’t managed after months of political combat to force Hillary Rodham Clinton out of the presidential race, so he’s about to try another approach: ignoring her. Confident that he has built a near-impregnable lead, his campaign aides said Wednesday that Obama would begin shifting his focus toward the general election. Obama still plans to campaign in states that remain on the primary calendar – he is to appear in Oregon over the weekend – but he may also start showing up in states that are considered important in the November contest: Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. (All three have held their Democratic primaries.) With Clinton’s hopes of capturing the Democratic nomination dimming, Obama needs to prepare for the prospect of a general election matchup with the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, aides said. “Everyone is eager to get on with this,” said David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s lead strategist. “We’ve got to multi-task here . . . Sen. McCain has basically run free for some time now.”
A TRAIN WRECK IS COMING ON MAY 20 (David Paul Kuhn, Politico) Not long after the polls close in the May 20 Kentucky and Oregon primaries, Barack Obama plans to declare victory in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. And, until at least May 31 and perhaps longer, Hillary Clinton’s campaign plans to dispute it. It’s a train wreck waiting to happen, with one candidate claiming to be the nominee while the other vigorously denies it, all predicated on an argument over what exactly constitutes the finish line of the primary race.
OBAMA’S SHOWING RESHAPES DISPUTE OVER DELEGATES (June Kronholz, Wall Street Journal) Tuesday’s primaries may not have settled the Democratic nomination, but they may have settled the problem of whether to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida at this summer’s convention. With a procedural clock ticking, the Democratic Party’s rules committee will hear challenges on May 31 to its decision to strip Florida and Michigan of their convention votes as punishment for holding out-of-sequence primaries last winter. A rules-committee decision that returned the two states’ 338 convention seats could swing the nomination to Hillary Clinton, and is one of the few remaining scenarios by which the New York senator could beat rival Barack Obama. But Sen. Clinton’s inability to derail Sen. Obama’s campaign Tuesday may have strengthened the Illinois senator’s hand with the rules committee, some committee members say. The likelier outcome now, they predict, is a decision to seat enough Florida and Michigan delegates to confirm Sen. Obama’s nomination, but not so many that they could swing the nomination to Sen. Clinton.
MORE: Michigan Dems Settle on How to Split Delegates (Detroit Free Press) Clinton won the Jan. 15 Michigan primary and was to get 73 pledged delegates under state party rules, while Obama was to get 55. The state also has 29 superdelegates. The state party’s executive committee voted today to ask the national party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee to approve the 69-59 delegate split when it meets May 31. The plan would shrink Clinton’s delegate edge in Michigan from 18 to 10 and allow the state’s 157 delegates and superdelegates to be seated at the convention.
OBAMA’S GAME CHANGING (Joe Klein, Time) Clinton’s paste-on populism changed absolutely nothing. The demographic blocs that had determined the shape of this remarkable campaign remained stolidly in place. Blacks, young people and those with college educations voted for Obama; Clinton won women, the elderly, whites without college educations. Clinton’s slim margin of victory in Indiana was provided, appropriately enough, by Republicans, who were 10% of the Democratic-primary electorate and whose votes she carried 54% to 46% — some, perhaps, at the behest of the merry prankster Rush Limbaugh, who had counseled his ditto heads to bring “chaos” to the Democratic electoral process by voting for their favorite whipping girl. Clinton’s new glow, her newfound stump proficiency, her symbiosis with Limbaugh, seemed an eerily Faustian narrative. But, as we know, those sorts of bargains tend to end badly. In this case, the upper-crust liberals who seemed ready to flee Obama in Pennsylvania — the sort of people who would run out and buy a hybrid before they’d support a reduction in the gasoline tax — decided to vote their faith that Obama was running an honorable campaign rather than their fear that his membership in Jeremiah Wright’s church would render him radioactive.
DID RUSH LIMBAUGH TILT RESULT IN INDIANA? (Alec MacGillis and Peter Slevin, Washington Post) In Indiana, six in 10 Republicans who supported Clinton on Tuesday said they would vote for presumptive GOP nominee John McCain over Clinton in the fall, if that were the matchup. By contrast, most Republicans who voted for Obama said they would back him against McCain. And a slight majority of Republicans who voted for Clinton in Indiana told pollsters that she does not share their values, raising further questions about why they supported her. But at least as much data suggested that many Republicans voted for Clinton because the Democratic primary was the more meaningful one and because they simply preferred her to Obama. In Indiana, about nine in 10 GOP Clinton voters said she would make a better commander in chief, and more than six in 10 said she would have a better shot at beating McCain… Edward Carmines, a political scientist at Indiana University, said that he concluded from the data that while Operation Chaos “existed to some extent, I don’t think it was a major factor.”
IT’S OBAMA, WARTS AND ALL (Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal) My analysis of individual state polls shows that today Mr. McCain would win 241 Electoral College votes to Mr. Obama’s 217, with 80 votes in toss-up states where neither candidate has more than a 3% lead. Ironically, Mrs. Clinton now leads Mr. McCain with 251 electoral votes to his 203 with 84 in toss-up states. This is the first time she’s led Mr. McCain since I began tracking state-by-state results in early March. Mr. McCain is realistic enough to know he will fall behind Mr. Obama once the Democratic nomination is settled. He’s steeled himself and his team for that moment. And he’s comforted by a belief that there will be plenty of time to recapture the lead. Mr. McCain saw Gerald Ford come from 30 points down to lose narrowly to Jimmy Carter in 1976, and watched George H.W. Bush overcome a 17-point deficit in the summer to hammer Michael Dukakis in the fall of 1988.
MCCAIN PUSHES PRIORITIES THAT RESONATE ON THE RIGHT (Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times) Senator John McCain appealed to religious conservatives on Wednesday with pledges to prosecute sex traffickers, fight Internet child pornography and make religious freedom a priority in American diplomacy. In a speech followed by tough questions from the audience about the war in Iraq and his temper, Mr. McCain said that those issues, particularly the fight against sex trafficking, would be important in his White House… In part because of the concerns of the right, President Bush has devoted more money and attention to the issue than his predecessors did. Conservatives, who are distrustful of Mr. McCain on a number of fronts, are pushing him to follow Mr. Bush’s lead.
KEY SUPERDELEGATES KEEPING PREFERENCES STRICTLY UNDER WRAPS (Sasha Issenberg, Boston Globe) Scores of officially uncommitted superdelegates have voted in the Democratic presidential race, including such subjects of ongoing speculation as Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi. While some say that additional factors will affect how they vote at the party’s convention, others are just staying silent about their preference. For them, what happens in the voting booth will stay in the voting booth - for now, at least.
CAMPAIGNS THROW OUT TRADITIONAL POLITICAL MAP (Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal) Barack Obama celebrated his win in North Carolina with a promise to return to a state no Democrat has carried in a presidential race since 1976. North Carolina, he said, is a swing state “where we will compete to win if I am the Democratic nominee for president.” This year, both sides are setting their sights on distant targets. The result may be a scrambled battleground map that mixes traditional swing states with those long thought to be in one camp or the other long before November.
REPUBLICANS FOCUS ON OBAMA AS FALL OPPONENT (Michael Cooper, New York Times) At least one political party is acting like it knows who the Democratic nominee will be: the Republicans, who have greatly stepped up their criticisms of Senator Barack Obama in recent weeks while practically ignoring Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton… Some of the issues that Republicans are beginning to raise paint a picture of what the fall election strategy against Mr. Obama might look like. Some are traditional, using Mr. Obama’s support for withdrawing the troops from Iraq to portray him as weak on national security and his opposition to suspending the federal gas tax this summer to show him as a tax-and-spend Democrat… Another line of attack seems to be squarely directed at independent and swing voters, whom both the McCain and Obama campaigns have been courting. The McCain campaign has argued that Mr. Obama lacks a record of bipartisan achievement to back up his calls for healing partisan rifts in Washington and getting things done.
