In W.Va., Clinton's Disciples Persevere
SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. -- They traveled here from New York, Pennsylvania and Indiana last week to stand in the rain on a rural street corner, at a four-way intersection of winding mountain roads. One woman, a doctor, took vacation time from her job to make the trip. Another, a mother of three, hired a babysitter for the first time in months.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...051002440.html
Barack Obama faces an untested set of hurdles
WASHINGTON -- For the first time, a major political party is on the brink of choosing an African American as its candidate for president, but when Democratic strategists and other analysts look ahead, they don't see race as Barack Obama's biggest challenge.
They worry more, they say, about other issues: Will swing voters view him as too young? Too inexperienced? Or too liberal?
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...,2580157.story
Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side
In August 1999,
Barack Obama strolled amid the floats and bands making their way down
Martin Luther King Drive on Chicago’s South Side. Billed as the largest African-American parade in the country, the summer rite was a draw over the years to boxing heroes like Muhammad Ali and jazz greats like Duke Ellington. It was also a must-stop for the city’s top politicians.
Back then, Mr. Obama, a state senator who was contemplating a run for Congress, was so little-known in the community’s black neighborhoods that it was hard to find more than a few dozen people to walk with him, recalled Al Kindle, one of his advisers at the time. Mr. Obama was trounced a year later in the Congressional race — branded as an aloof outsider more at home in the halls of
Harvard than in the rough wards of Chicago politics.
But by 2006, Mr. Obama had remade his political fortunes. He was a freshman United States senator on the cusp of deciding to take on the formidable
Hillary Rodham Clinton and embark on a long-shot White House run. When the parade wound its way through the South Side that summer, Mr. Obama was its grand marshal.
The secret of his transformation, which has brought him to the brink of claiming the Democratic presidential nomination, can be described as the politics of maximum unity.
He moved from his leftist Hyde Park base to more centrist circles; he forged early alliances with the good-government reform crowd only to be embraced later by the city’s all-powerful Democratic bosses; he railed against pork-barrel politics but engaged in it when needed; and he empathized with the views of his
Palestinian friends before adroitly courting the city’s politically potent Jewish community.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/us...jrMC5I7+doSAmQ
The Electoral Map
Here are what the Obama and McCain campaigns now consider the true battleground states going into the fall campaign, assuming — as both candidates now do — that Barack Obama is likely to win his party's nomination. In addition to these states, both sides have states that they say (or rather hope) will come into play in the months ahead — think New Jersey for Republicans and Georgia for Democrats — but for the time being, this is where the action is going to be.
http://politics.nytimes.com/election...map/index.html
Hybrid Mode
