expose obama

(04-23) 04:00 PDT Washington - –
Winning Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton added the nation’s sixth-largest state to an impressive list: California, Ohio, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, New Jersey and in her view, Florida and Michigan.
Yet few Democrats important to her nomination seem to much care, including superdelegates such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, whose comments have seemed to favor rival Sen. Barack Obama, and former Vice President Al Gore, who is estranged from the Clintons.
Nor are they paying much attention to her argument that Obama’s inability to put her away in the big states, all of which carry large numbers of Electoral College votes in November, expose weaknesses in an Obama candidacy against Republican Sen. John McCain.
They might be listening instead to Obama’s argument that he will win California hands down in the fall, along with other overwhelmingly Democratic states Clinton claims, and that he can put in play smaller ones like Virginia that she can’t touch.
Yet the campaign has exposed Obama’s glaring weakness among the working-class whites Democrats need to win the presidency.
“If I told you somebody was winning California, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Michigan and Florida and was not winning the nomination, you’d say something was wrong,” said Democratic consultant Doug Schoen. “And something arguably is not right.”
If Democrats had the same winner-take-all process that catapulted McCain toward the GOP nomination despite close victories in a fractured field, Clinton would have all but wrapped up the Democratic nomination on Feb. 5, when she took four of the six largest states, including California by a nine-point margin.
The Electoral College is a similar winner-take-all system that would seem to play to Clinton’s strengths and prey on Obama’s weaknesses.
Obama could be, as his campaign insists, changing the electoral map by energizing millions of young voters and drawing independents.

sfgate.com


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