Obama landslides could break deadlock

Barack Obama’s landslide victories in three mid-sized states Saturday suggest that he has the opportunity to build a significant lead over Hillary Rodham Clinton among the locked-in “pledged” delegates before the candidates face off in the big battlegrounds of Ohio and Texas on March 4.

The results in Washington and Nebraska vindicated Obama’s strategy of preparing expensive efforts to organize votes after the Feb. 5 contests that many expected — wrongly — effectively to decide the race. Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, played down its own efforts in the states, though she did air television ads in both Washington and Nebraska.

Obama also won in Louisiana, buoyed by taking nearly 90 percent of the support of black voters, according to exit polls. And he won overwhelmingly in the U.S. Virgin Islands, winning all three of the territory’s pledged delegates.

In squeezing every delegate out of the small and mid-sized states between now and March 4, and every dollar out of his supporters, Obama is hoping to build a head of steam this month that will make him unstoppable and will lure free-floating superdelegates to his camp.

Clinton, meanwhile, aims to keep the debate national in scope and sharply competitive in the national media, if not on the ground in the primary states.

Though turnout in the Washington and Nebraska caucuses overwhelmed the state parties, the raw numbers of voters were relatively small: About 40,000 people, in total, participated in the Nebraska caucus.

But in what was a test of enthusiasm and organization, Obama showed an ability not just to win but also to rack up the landslide margins necessary to build a delegate lead. He seemed set to gain on Clinton by a margin of well over 40 delegates Saturday night, according to preliminary estimates. (A Democratic candidate needs 2,025 delegates to claim the nomination.)

“Today, voters from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast to the heart of America stood up to say that it is time to turn the page,” Obama told the Virginia Democratic Party’s Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Richmond, according to his prepared remarks. He told the gathering that he represents “real change” and touted his appeal to independent voters.

Clinton, meanwhile, didn’t congratulate Obama in her speech to the Richmond gathering earlier in the evening. Instead, she continued to draw sharp contrasts with her rival, and associated him with the likely Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

“I am the only candidate left in this race, Democrat or Republican, with a health-care plan to cover every single man, woman and child,” she said.

Her campaign also sought to introduce a measure of good news by releasing word, as polls closed in Louisiana, that she had raised $10 million from more than 100,000 donors this month.

Obama’s campaign shot back that more than 350,000 donors have given him money this year.

Though high turnout and a surge of new voters have been regular features of this primary cycle, they still seemed to strain untested primary and caucus systems in states unused to being the focus of national attention.

In Louisiana, the Obama campaign complained of “irregularities” after, it said, Democrats claiming their party registration had been switched were not permitted to cast provisional ballots.

However, it was unclear whether Obama's supporters had actually registered as Democrats and were turned away improperly, or were in fact independents and unable to vote in the primary.

And in Washington, caucusgoers cited “pandemonium” and “chaos” in flooded caucus sites, prompting the editor of The Stranger, the alternative weekly newspaper in Seattle, to compare the scene to a horror movie.

“The gym at Stevens Elementary right now resembles the Brooklyn Bridge scene in Cloverfield — only without the promise of giant, derivative monster showing up to put Capitol Hill caucus-goers out of our misery,” the editor, Dan Savage, wrote on the newspaper’s blog [LINK: http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/the_cloverfield_caucus] Saturday.

“And instead of bloodied hipsters asking each other ‘What the hell is that?’ over and over again, it’s roughly 1500 people wearing tasteful scarfs asking each other, ‘Where the hell is the line for my precinct table?’”

The two candidates, meanwhile, spent parts of Saturday in Maine, preparing for a hard-fought caucus. Observers there had one eye to the weather, which threatens snow — offering an edge to the candidate with the most devoted supporters.

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