Obama Wins Maine As Clinton Shakes Up Staff

Posted by Ashish on 02.10.2008

Problems continue for Clinton as Obama keeps growing before our eyes....

Barack Obama won the Maine caucus today by a large double digit margin. Many figured Clinton could win or at least finish a close second in Maine due to the demographics heavily favoring her as well as her success in other New England states. Obama's win caps off a full weekend sweep as he won Washington, Louisiana, Nebraska, the Virgin Islands, and Maine. Most also expect Obama to win Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. on Tuesday which would give him eight straight wins since Super Tuesday.

Clinton was hoping that she could pull out Maine due to the demographics and because she had the support of the Democratic political machine in Maine. She fought for the state, campaigning there yesterday, but it wasn't enough to stop another big loss.

The other thing that really struck me is that Obama finally won the expectations game this weekend, possibly the one area where he was consistently losing to Clinton. Obama's camp leaked an internal memo a few days ago which stated that they expect to lose Maine and expect Louisiana to be close. Instead, they won every state including Maine and by margins much bigger than the ones they listed on their internal memo. The media bit on to this and portrayed Obama's wins accordingly. Obama has grown up drastically over the course of this campaign and he continues to do so. The fact that he seems to have out organized the Clinton political machine is amazing when you consider that Obama built his organization from scratch less than two years ago while the Clinton machine has been around since the 90s.

Following a horrible weekend for her, Clinton also announced a major staff shake up. Clinton replaced her campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle with longtime aide Maggie Williams. The move enforces what many have suspected, that the Clinton camp is not happy with how things are going. The media will likely use this, along with her recent $5 million loan and her string of losses to Obama, to paint Obama as the frontrunner in the coming days.

As I said in my article this morning, Clinton is getting into a very dangerous position of having to win both Texas and Ohio on March 4th after a month of losses. The way things are going, unless she can pull out Wisconsin in a few weeks, a loss in either Texas or Ohio will be viewed as crippling to her campaign and we may begin to see the party rally around Obama as the presumptive nominee. Of course, there is still a long ways to go until then. The demographics of Ohio and Texas strongly favor Clinton and she also has the support of many of the powerful political factions in both states. Whether a month of wins for Obama is enough to make up for all of that remains to be seen, but do or die situations are never good, and that is what Clinton will likely be in.

What Clinton does now to try and get some positive attention onto her as she suffers all these large losses will be interesting. The Clinton camp has tried to go negative on Obama ever since Iowa and have basically failed everytime. The drug attack didn't work. Painting Obama has a "risk" didn't work. And the extremely bad race baiting tactic didn't work and actually was instrumental in rallying black voters behind Obama. Remember, Clinton LED among black voters all the way until early January. Now Obama is winning black voters by over 80%. She will definitely do something now, and for a candidate that emphasizes her experience, she better get her new line of attack right because another wrong direction could cost her the nomination. Both Clinton and Obama are fighting hard to get John Edwards' endorsement, and I would expect Clinton to really turn up her attempt to land him, as that would serve as a way of stopping Obama's momentum, at least for a day.

And if all the state losses and campaign turmoil weren't enough for the Clintons, Obama also beat Bill Clinton to win a Grammy today in the Best Spoken Word Album category for his audiotape book of The Audacity of Hope. When it rains, it pours.