Clinton Vs Obama - The Final Days

A good place to pop back and read every few days is Marc Ambrinder's blog for the Atlantic.

The Obama campaign is organising voter-registration drives in 110 cities around the US. That is, Obama is already behaving like the general election candidate for the Democrats. Ambinder points out how sophisticated Obama has been at "data mining" and building up a voter database. A reader of his blog takes up the story:

"I donated a small amount and supplied my work contact information below before the California primary. A few days later, I get a message on my home answering machine – not the numbers below and _not_ a listed number – thanking me for my support and inviting me to an event “at a neighbor’s house” two blocks from my house (miles away from the information I supplied below). I was not contacted at my work address. So they took my name from the donation and then located my unlisted home phone number and unprovided home address and put it in their database so they could contact me for a neighborhood meet up."

Apart from Ambrinder, Andrew Sullivan persuasively argues that Clinton is a dead woman walking, especially with regards to the African-American vote. Obama, even after all the Jeremiah Wright controversy, is making inroads in white voters who haven't gone on to university.

In last Tuesday’s North Carolina primary, Clinton got only 7% of the black vote – a lower percentage than Nixon or Reagan had won in general elections. In a few months, the Clintons have turned a 30-point lead among African-Americans into a deficit of more than 80 points. No constituency has swung as much over the past few months. The more the Clintons attempted to polarise the voting racially, the more successful Obama was in deflecting it. His rebuke of Wright probably helped. But also the profound media attention. The more working-class white voters actually saw and heard of him, the more their fears of the unknown seemed to subside.

He won only 27% of white voters without college degrees in Ohio; he won 29% in Pennsylvania and 34% of them in Indiana. And when you look at age, the effect is even more striking. In North Carolina, a southern state, Obama won 57% of white voters under 30 and 45% of white voters under 40.

[Bill Clinton] never ran against a black candidate and neither did his wife. They are used to loving and supporting minorities – as long as the minorities know their place and see the Clintons as the instrument of their salvation. Obama broke that dependency and that relationship. And that was why the Clintons had to do all they could to destroy and belittle and besmirch him.