• ADEMOS_P1
• csmli-1
• stem-1

• ADEMOS_P2
• csmli-2
• stem-2

• ADEMOS_G1
• csmli-3
• stem-3

• ADEMOS_P3
• csmli-4
• stem-4

Super Tuesday unlikely to settle Obama-Clinton race

The former first lady's imposing national lead among Democratic voters faded leading up to the 22-state sweepstakes.

By Ariel Sabar | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the February 5, 2008 edition

Page 1 of 2

Washington - A nail-biter of a fight for the Democratic presidential nomination enters its biggest day Tuesday, with voters in 22 states and American Samoa casting ballots in a historymaking race.

Polls released over the weekend show Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, long the national Democratic front-runner, losing ground. In just the past few days, Sen. Barack Obama has pulled even in key states long seen as Clinton country, among them California, New Jersey, and Missouri.

The tightness of the race increases the odds that the battle for the nomination will stretch past Tuesday into the more than a dozen states voting in mid-February and early March.

Still, it is hard to overstate the significance of the voting Tuesday: About 83 percent of delegates needed for the nomination are up for grabs. With the withdrawal last week of former Sen. John Edwards, Super Tuesday offers the first one-on-one showdown between the front-runners.

Recent days have seen the lead candidates and their surrogates in a frantic coast-to-coast hunt for votes. With her large lead in delegate-rich California gone as of the weekend, according to several polls, Senator Clinton dispatched her husband, President Bill Clinton, there for two days while she traveled to Missouri, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

She bought an hour of airtime on the Hallmark Channel Monday night for a "Voices Across America" town-hall meeting.

On Sunday, California's first lady, Maria Shriver, endorsed Senator Obama at a Los Angeles rally featuring two other supporters – Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy – expected to help him cut into Clinton's support among women. Obama spent the weekend in Idaho, Minnesota, Missouri, and Delaware and was scheduled Monday to visit New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

For both candidates, the road to Super Tuesday has been long and hard-fought. The primary season opened early and wide, with eight Democratic candidates vying for the nomination before contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina whittled the field to two.

Shrewd campaigners who raised more than $100 million apiece last year, Clinton and Obama each won a pair of the four contested primaries thus far.

Seldom have two hopefuls entered the biggest day of voting on such seemingly equal footing. Never before has either a woman or an African-American been this close to either party's nomination.

Clinton, with her high name recognition in Democratic politics, had led in the national polls for more than a year. But the second-term senator and former first lady, who has cast herself as the battle-tested candidate of experience, has faced unexpectedly stiff head winds since Obama's victory in Iowa on Jan. 3.

Obama, a first-term Illinois senator, put together vibrant grass-roots organizations in early-voting states, where he invested months on the ground introducing himself to voters with stirring oratory and a theme of hope. His challenge Tuesday will be battling the Clinton name in states that know him less well and where television ads play a bigger role than the grueling shoe-leather politics he parlayed into victories in Iowa and South Carolina.

Page 1 | 2 | Next Page