Obama One Step Up, Hillary Two Steps Back

For every step forward Barack Obama takes toward winning the Democrat Party's nomination, Hillary Clinton seems to take two steps back.

Now, she is taking some dramatic steps in response to Obama's winning weekend.

VIRGINIA BEACH -- Senator Barack Obama racked up his fourth decisive victory this weekend, winning the Maine caucuses on Sunday, as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton replaced her campaign manager and longtime aide in the biggest shakeup of her campaign to date.

In a fast-paced day of striking contrasts, Mr. Obama showed new confidence as he soaked up the roar of his crowds, drawing an audience the campaign estimated at 18,000 people to a convention center here. He referred only in passing to his victory in Maine, where he won 59 percent of the vote in a state that Mrs. Clinton had thought could be hers.

Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, replaced Patti Solis Doyle, who led her campaign since it began last year and whom she regarded almost as an adopted daughter. In her place, she named another longtime aide, Maggie Williams.

The switch occurred at a time when Mrs. Clinton has found her campaign in a slump, coming off a split victory in a multistate round of nominating contests on Feb. 5 and losing badly in a string of state caucuses that relied on a high level of on-the-ground organizational skills at which the Obama campaign excelled.

At the same time, she suffered a setback over money, and though in recent days the campaign has boasted of a $10 million month and many new donors, it never built the online donor base that Ms. Doyle had promised. Nor did it adapt to Mr. Obama’s message of inspiration as his campaign grew in strength, prolonging the battle long past the point when Mrs. Clinton was expected by her strategists to have clinched the nomination.

The replacement of Ms. Doyle was in part a signal to donors and other supporters that the campaign was regrouping and was poised to right itself, even as Mrs. Clinton faces uncertain prospects Tuesday in contests in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

There's no denying that Obama-mania is sweeping the country.

Hillary is looking more and more like she's struggling to keep up with him.

She is the front-runner no more.

Meanwhile, Obama is brimming with confidence.

...“We won by a sizable margin in Maine and I want to thank the people of Maine,” [Obama] said to the cheers of thousands of people. “We have now won on the Atlantic coast, we’ve won in the Gulf Coast, we won on the Pacific Coast and we won in between those coasts.”

On top of it all, Mr. Obama beat out Bill Clinton for a Grammy, winning the spoken word award for the audio-book version of his memoir, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.”

Obama is a star.

People treat him like one and he acts like one. He's ready for his close-up.

...Mr. Obama intensified his criticisms of Mrs. Clinton — and her husband — saying that when Mr. Clinton was president Democrats lost at every level of government and that Mrs. Clinton could not bridge the nation’s political divide.

“Senator Clinton starts off with 47 percent of the country against her,” he said in response to a question in Alexandria. “That’s a hard place to start.”

Mr. Obama said the Clintons had been unable to assemble a working majority in Congress in the 1990s, when Mr. Clinton was president.

“She’s a smart person, she’s a capable person, she would be a vast improvement over the incumbent,” he said in response to a question at a rally with 3,000 people, with 1,200 more listening in an overflow room. “What is also true is, I think it’s very hard for Senator Clinton to break out of the politics of the last 15 years.”

Mr. Obama said the country was divided politically, with about 47 percent on each side and the rest in the middle and that Mrs. Clinton would be unable to bring people together.

“Keep in mind, we had Bill Clinton as president when, in ’94, we lost the House, we lost the Senate, we lost governorships, we lost state houses,” he said. “And so, regardless of what policies they wanted to promote, they didn’t have a working majority to bring change about.”

It's interesting that Obama has decided to take on Bill Clinton, now that Bill has said he made mistakes by defending Hillary and promised to tone down his rhetoric.

Bill pledges to behave and Obama goes after him, baiting him. Obama definitely is in charge.

This is interesting, too:

... Ms. Doyle had come into the organization with a plan to build a vast online network of donors who can be tapped at any time for infusions of cash. That goal appears to have been achieved by the Obama campaign, while Mrs. Clinton continues to rely on big donors who months ago gave the limit, $2,300, to the primary campaign.

The race, too, was never supposed to go on this long. Strategists for Mrs. Clinton expected her to wrap it all up by Feb. 5, but with Mr. Obama picking up states and delegates there is widespread anticipation that the race can continue through late spring.

...Some Clinton advisers rued the timing [of replacing Doyle], noting that Matt Drudge referred to the switch on his Web site as the departure of the campaign’s “top Latina” — an emphasis on Ms. Doyle’s ethnicity that Mrs. Clinton does not need as she heads toward a Texas primary on March 4 and tries to court the state’s large Hispanic vote.

That was a cowardly move by The Times. Why quote Drudge about Doyle's ethnicity? It's as though The Times let Drudge do its dirty work to avoid riling the Clinton camp.

Time is not on Hillary's side.

The longer the race goes on, the more momentum Obama picks up.