Obama wins Wisconsin primary poll

Obama is leaving Clinton standing in his wake as he took the Wisconsin primary last night, and it is widely expected that he will also take Hawaii where he was born and where a further twenty delegates are at stake.

Again, what should be worrying for Hillary are the many ways that he is eating into territory that she has always regarded as her own.

With 95% of the ballots counted, Mr Obama had 58% of the vote to Mrs Clinton's 41%.

It is a major disappointment for Mrs Clinton, the senator for New York, who had been hoping to restore momentum to her campaign.

Instead, Mr Obama was reported to have gained almost equal support from white women, and to have polled well from working-class Democrats - both groups which have usually supported Mrs Clinton.

Mr Obama also took the youth vote and six out of 10 self-described independent voters, according to exit polls for ABC

Hillary continued to hit her theme that Obama has nothing to offer:

Addressing a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, Mrs Clinton said the primary campaign was "about picking a president who relies not just on words but on work - hard work to get America back to work".

John McCain, after a victory in Wisconsin that further cements him as the probable Republican candidate, also turned his attention to Obama rather than to Hillary, signalling that he too believes it might be all over for the Clinton campaign.

He immediately turned to attacking Obama, accusing the Democratic frontrunner of being confused about foreign policy and dealing in hollow promises. "I will fight every moment of every day in this campaign to make sure Americans are not deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change," Mr. McCain said.

Minutes later, Obama hit back in his victory speech to a rally in Houston, Texas. "He represents the policy of yesterday and we want to be the party of tomorrow," Obama said.

And so McCain, like Hillary, seeks to attack Obama for possessing a rhetorical gift which both of them lack; implying that charisma and substance are qualities that cannot possibly be held simultaneously within one person and attempting to reduce the "substance" issue to an either/or equation: "You can EITHER speak well OR have substance." "You EITHER can be dynamic OR be serious". In doing this they both ignore the fact that history has provided us with many examples - Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, etc., etc., - of people who easily managed to combine rhetorical flourish with substance.

In attacking him in this way both are seeking to cover deep fault lines in their own campaigns. Clinton is seeking to fight the fact that her name alone is deeply polarising and that she is perceived - rightly or wrongly - as cold.

And McCain is a 71 year old man who thinks that it wouldn't be a bad thing to stay in Iraq for another 100 years.

It's easy to see why both of them find Obama a problem, but I still find their attacks on his rhetorical ability to be counter productive. In attacking him in this way they are both offering him a strange back-handed compliment, and a tacit admission that he can move crowds in a way that neither of them could ever match.

Nor do these attacks appear to be having any effect. Indeed, quite the opposite. It is being reported that Clinton's tactic of attacking Obama on the charge of plagiarism appears to have backfired on her:

The (Clinton) campaign also appears to have miscalculated with a last-minute burst of negative advertisements in Wisconsin. The Clinton campaign had accused Obama of plagiarising his speeches from the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. But the attacks appeared to have alienated late deciding voters who turned towards Obama.

And for all of Clinton and McCain's obsession with Obama's vocal skills, the concerns of the voters - as expressed by exit polls - seemed to be on the issues:

In exit polls, nine of 10 voters said they were most concerned about the economy -- an issue that in the past had favoured Clinton's bread-and-butter approach to politics. But in Wisconsin those voters turned towards Obama, rejecting Clinton's claim to be the candidate best placed to deal with an ailing economy and understand the concerns of working class Democrats.

They can both try to write him off as having no "substance", but in primary after primary, it is becoming abundantly clear that the public aren't buying this particular attack line.

Hillary's response appears to be a promise to fight an even more negative campaign than the one she is currently engaging in:

Mrs. Clinton wasted no time in signaling that she would now take a tougher line against Mr. Obama — a recognition, her advisers said, that she must act to alter the course of the campaign and define Mr. Obama on her terms.

As she was making this promise, cable television networks dropped her in midsentence, as Obama had started to make a speech. Is it that pesky charisma thing? Or is it simply a further indication that Obama is now the clear front runner?

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Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, US elections 2008, Wisconsin, democratic nomination