Shameran Abed

Illinois senator Barack Obama has turned the race for the Democratic Party's nomination for the United States presidential elections on its head. Even late last year, he had trailed New York senator Hillary Clinton by over 20 percentage points in every national opinion poll, and trailed by double digits in almost every state other than in his own. She had instant name recognition, had raised over a 100 million dollars that helped put together a national campaign and had some of the best Democratic strategists including her husband, former president Bill Clinton, on her side. There was an air of inevitability about Hillary's nomination, something that her campaign tried to use to its advantage by making her run as an incumbent rather than as a challenger. In November, she said in a television interview, 'It will be me.'

As of today, Obama has won twice the number of states than Clinton, a million more votes, has nearly a hundred additional delegates and has come off the back of eleven successive primary and caucus victories, all of them by double digits. He has also started to eat into groups that were once core Clinton constituencies – women, people without a college education, lower income whites, etc. While it is true that anyone who writes off the Clintons do so at their own peril, that is also the only thing that is keeping analysts and commentators from writing Hillary's political obituary. Her climb to the summit now is steep and getting steeper by the day while Obama is out-raising, out-spending, out-strategising and out-hustling her to the nomination. But how did senator Clinton go from being front-runner and near-presumptive nominee to being thumped in state after state by someone her campaign has been trying to paint as an upstart who is all talk and no action?

Some political commentators have likened Clinton's campaign to president George W Bush's disastrous Iraq war plan – once it hit them that it wasn't going to be a cakewalk, there was no contingency plan, no plan B. Clinton had bet the 100 million dollars she had raised to out-muscle Obama by February 5, by which date more than half the states would have voted. She lavished 25 million dollars on the first contest in Iowa while Obama went about building an organisation from the ground up. Her campaign spent nearly 100,000 dollars on sandwich platters to be delivered to pre-caucus parties in Iowa and bought hundreds of shovels to clear the snow so that people could go and caucus for her on January. Obama won Iowa by 8 percentage points, Hillary came third and it didn't snow on caucus night.

Clinton narrowly won the next two contests that mattered, New Hampshire and Nevada, but got thumped again in South Carolina. Clinton had been leading by wide margins in opinion polls even at the beginning of the year in South Carolina, but that all changed when her husband, the former president who was once affectionately named the 'first black president' by the African-American community, started invoking the race issue and comparing Obama to the last black presidential phenomenon, Reverend Jessie Jackson, who did not manage to win the Democratic nomination in 1984 despite doing well in several states. The former president was unleashed by his wife's campaign on South Carolina because her strategists felt that his popularity among African-Americans would help ensure that the state's large black community would vote for the New York senator. Instead, Bill Clinton managed to anger the black community by seemingly insulting the first viable African-American presidential candidate by playing the race card.

The Clinton campaign spun her loss in South Carolina by claiming that Obama won because of the state's large black community, attempting in vain to paint him as a candidate whose popularity is restricted to the black community in the hopes of a white backlash, even though he had thrashed her earlier in Iowa, a state in which 96 per cent of the population are white. Clinton was still hoping for a February 5 blow-out, when 22 states would vote and she was confident of taking a sizeable enough lead among delegates to force Obama out of the race. The momentum Obama had gained had narrowed the lead in many of the states that were once solidly behind Clinton, and she spent millions of dollars and campaigned heavily to hold on to once guaranteed states – California and New Jersey among them. When the results came in on February 5, Clinton did managed to hold on to some of the bigger states, among them California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and her home state of New York, but she was unable to land a knock-out blow.

Instead, it was Obama who outperformed predictions by winning 13 of the 22 states, including presidential battlegrounds like Missouri and states that were previously Clinton-country like Connecticut. Also, the proportional representation system in Democratic primary contests meant that even in the larger delegate-rich states that Clinton won, Obama was able to pick up sizeable numbers of delegates. As a result, instead of Hillary wrapping up the nomination, it was Obama who was on the ascendancy after February 5, having tied Clinton on the number of delegates won through voting and trailing only in super-delegates – elected Democratic office-holders such as senators, congressmen, governors etc and members of the Democratic National Committee – who are given automatic invitation to the party's national convention. Most of the super-delegates who had decided to endorse a candidate early – about half are yet to endorse – put their support behind Clinton sometime last year when she was the clear front-runner, some in the hopes of being rewarded by her if she became president. Almost every super-delegate who has endorsed a candidate in the last month or so have endorsed Obama, with even some who had endorsed Clinton switching their loyalties.

By handily winning all 11 contests that have taken place since February 5, from Maryland, Virginia and Maine in the east to Louisiana in south, from Wisconsin in the midwest to Washington state on the pacific coast, Obama has now taken a near unassailable lead among pledged delegates and is also closing the gap with Clinton among super-delegates. She now needs to win the remaining contests, especially the big states such as Texas and Ohio, which vote on March 4, and Pennsylvania, which votes on April 22, by wide margins to catch up with Obama. However, given the momentum that Obama has gained with his 11-straight winning streak, even her campaign is unsure about how to take him on and beat him.

Almost everything that the Clinton campaign has tried so far has failed. At first, it tried to take advantage of the air of inevitability around her, but Obama burst that bubble in Iowa. Clinton next tried to invoke his race as an issue, it backfired spectacularly. After February 5, the Clinton camp claimed that Obama only does well in smaller 'insignificant' states, but voters didn't take to her campaign's 'insult 40 states' strategy. She tried to suggest that he only does well in caucuses while she wins primaries but he has won more primaries than caucuses. She has even tried the electability argument, but Democrats have realised that Obama's popularity among independents and his ability to draw new voters to the polls make him more electable. After the inevitability bubble was burst, Clinton changed her tack to claiming that she, as a woman, was aiming to break through the highest and hardest 'glass ceiling' in American politics, but voters still don't understand how a multi-millionaire wife of a former two-term president can claim to be pushing against the hardest 'glass ceiling' when her opponent is an African-American first-term senator with a Muslim sounding name that rhymes with Osama.

In truth, Barack Obama has been running the campaign that Clinton ought to have run, working tirelessly to build political organisations in each state from the ground up, relying on small contributions from millions of donors rather than large corporate donations to fund his campaign and running on an inspirational message of hope and optimism at a time when the country is demoralised after 8 years under a president who has neither made America more safe nor more popular. The people of America, it appears, want change in Washington, and Obama has personified change while Clinton has appeared dull and uninspiring. Ironically, Obama and not Hillary is the reincarnation of the Bill Clinton of 1992, a brilliant orator who has seized the moment and is carrying his country in a wave of hope and optimism. On the other hand, Clinton, as one American commentator has written in the New York Times, 'must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.'

Clinton could yet be the Democratic nominee for president. Texas with its large Hispanic population, which has been a Clinton stronghold, and Ohio with its large low-income population, another group that Hillary has done well amongst, could provide a firewall for her to break Obama's momentum. But it appears increasingly likely that something out of the ordinary, such as the uncovering of an Obama scandal, will have to occur for her to be able to win big. It is an unfortunate twist of fate for her, for at any other time and against any other candidate, Clinton would be a shoo-in to the nomination. It just so happened that she came up against an Obama type of candidate whose campaign is more akin to a movement. Many people know that it might be too good to be true or too good to last, but they still want to be a part of Obamamania while it does. For Hillary, her day of reckoning is March 4. If she does not turn the tide around and take Ohio and Texas by sizeable margins, the Democratic Party will anoint Barack Obama as its nominee for the fall elections.

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