RealClearPolitics, 25 July 2008

The Presumptive - and Presumptuous - Nominee

There was a spring in Barack Obama's step and a sense of heady excitement in the air as he took to the stage beside Berlin's Victory column for his latest Big Speech. Members of his expansive entourage could have been forgiven for dreaming about the West Wing offices they will occupy in January.

By any yardstick, the first half of the Illinois senator's foreign tour was everything his campaign staff had wished for and a little bit more. Wherever he went, world leaders wanted to bask in his reflected glory as the presumed next president.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq's welcoming gift was an endorsement of Obama's troop withdrawal plan. King Abdullah of Jordan was happy to be his limo driver in Amman while Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted she "wouldn't resist" another presidential back massage.

No wonder some in corridors of London's Foreign Office fear that Obamamania has taken such a grip on 10 Downing Street that the eagerness of Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his acolytes to get a sprinkling of the stardust might alienate John McCain.

Back in the United States, photographs of Obama in shades and headphones besides a respectful General David Petraeus looking out over Baghdad from a Black Hawk helicopter set the tone from the get go.

They screamed commander-in-chief and man of action even without being shown alongside footage of John McCain and President George H. W. Bush tooling around in a golf cart looking like two wayward seniors who'd escaped from a Florida rest home.

Obama sank a three-pointer basket with troops in Afghanistan. McCain stood in front of rows of cheese in a supermarket in Bethlehem, Pa. Obama flew into Berlin to a crowd of 200,000. Weather forced McCain to abandon a trip to a Louisiana oil rig so he settled for munching on "best of the wurst" at a German "sausage haus" in Columbus, Ohio.

Team McCain seemed frustrated by the way the week unfolded. Having goaded Obama into visiting Iraq, McCain must have been ruing that he had not been more careful what he'd wished for.

But for all the adulation abroad, Obama is nowhere near sealing the deal at home. The latest WSJ/NBC poll gives him a modest six-point lead over McCain. Dig down into the detail and there are some warning signs for Obama.

McCain has as 11-point advantage in terms of background and values that voters identify with. By a 20-point margin, voters consider Obama the riskier choice at a time when America is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and facing a global threat from militant Islamists. Far from being the referendum on the Bush years that most Democratic strategists want, the central election theme is whether Americans can go for Obama.

Certainly, Obama needed to boost his commander-in-chief credentials and his world jaunt may well do just that. But his globe trotting took him away from the bread-and-butter economic issues that the November election might well turn on. And the images of McCain plowing a lonely furrow in Ohio and New Hampshire while Obama whoops it up with adoring anchors in foreign capitals might make some voters feel the Republican is more in touch with their concerns.

Despite the justifiable accusations that much of the media has a crush on Obama, members of his traveling press corps - the people who are central to shaping the day-to-day coverage and can easily turn on a candidate - don't quite see it that way.

On the O-Force One campaign plane (newly fitted out complete with a chair embroidered with "Obama '08/President" for the man Republicans like to mock as "the One") there has been friction over what some journalists view as growing arrogance in Obamaland.

When Jim Steinberg, Bill Clinton's former national security adviser, told reporters that during four years in the White House he had never had to go on the record for a briefing there was a chorus of retorts that Obama wasn't in the White House.

The same day, during a testy exchange in which Team Obama persisted with the preposterous contention that the Berlin speech was not a campaign event, Susan Rice, another Obama foreign policy aide, was also accused of hubris.

"It is not going to be a political speech,' she said. "When the President of the United States goes and gives a speech, it is not a political speech or a political rally." A reporter reminded her: "But he is not President of the United States."

The images of Obama's Berlin speech were grand and the address itself, though far from one of his best and almost devoid of policy substance, would have been a pretty decent one had it been delivered after he had won the White House.

But he is not President of the United States. The sham humility of announcing that "I speak to you not as a candidate for President but as a citizen" came across as simply disingenuous. Saying that "I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken here" seemed like a craven attempt to invoke comparisons with John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Appealing to the notion of "global citizenship" and the planet's population to "come together to save the world" might not play that well in Peoria. It's difficult to disagree with the notion that "my country has not perfected itself" but to say it in Europe - to cheers - is a different issue.

Those concerned that Obama might be elitist or lacking in patriotism will not have been reassured by his modified stump speech riff: "People of Berlin - people of the world - this is our moment, this is our time."

Obama's whole trip has apparently been aimed at American voters. No foreign reporters were granted places on his O-Force One and the only interviews he's deigned to give so far have been to the American big shots. There's a gnashing of teeth at the BBC that the two interviews he's scheduled in London are with Tom Brokaw of NBC (even though Obama will be back in Chicago by the time "Meet the Press" airs) and Bill Hemmer of Fox.

If the US electorate was the target of his Berlin speech, however, he was wide of the mark.

Before landing in the German capital, Obama seemed to have an inkling that there might be a downside to the European leg of his grand tour, describing the speech as a "high wire" act and a "crapshoot"

He may be the narrow front runner for the White House but there's still an election and the sense of irrational exuberance enveloping his campaign is dangerous.

Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee. Americans admire self-confidence up to a point, but fueling the notion that he's a presumptuous nominee is a good way to lose in November.

The Daily Telegraph, 21 July 2008

No free ride for Europe, says top Barack Obama aide

Europe will be challenged by a President Barack Obama to contribute more to global security and will no longer have the "easy out" of pandering to anti-Bush sentiment, according to a top adviser to the Democratic candidate.

Washington

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph on the eve of Mr Obama's week-long trip to Afghanistan, the Middle East and Europe, Susan Rice emphasised that the election of Mr Obama would mark a decision by Americans to "turn the page" on President George W Bush.

But the former Rhodes Scholar, who took her Master's degree and doctorate in international relations at New College, Oxford, made clear that an Obama administration would also challenge Europe to do more after a Democratic victory in November's election.

"It would signal a return to the more pragmatic and bi-partisan traditions of American foreign policy, which have been lost to ideology in the Bush years," she said. "He will not proceed through an ideological frame and seek to impose that frame on every challenge.

"There is some truth to the notion that some of the animus at the popular level towards the Bush administration may have made it easier for some of our European partners to avoid taking steps that we may want them to take and that perhaps they ought to take," she said.

"That has, in some respects, perhaps on some issues, given them an easy out. Barack Obama will lead from a position of strength and seek progress, and he will want to work with Europe in very strong partnership.

"It means we in the United States will have to do our part; but Europe will have to do its part too. There can be no free riders if this is going to be an effective partnership."

The Obama campaign has highlighted Afghanistan as a prime example, arguing that Europe should send more troops there and lift restrictions on how they can be used.

On Tuesday, Mr Obama argued for a major sift in American policy away from the "single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq" towards a broader approach to the world and vowed to send more troops to Afghanistan.

"Among the issues we will want to focus on together are a strong and effective approach to Iran and to the larger non-proliferation challenge, a robust effort to tackle climate change, as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the situation is deteriorating and where we in the US as well as Nato need to do more," said Miss Rice.

She added: "And so Obama will ask more of ourselves and ask more of our closest allies."

Mr Obama is committed to withdrawing American troops from Iraq at a rate of one to two brigades a month. "Obama will maintain a residual US presence, but not permanent bases, to carry out specific missions.

She described these as "protecting our embassy, civilians and humanitarian workers; conducting counter-terrorism operations against remaining al-Qaeda elements; and continuing to train Iraqi police and security forces, if the Iraqis are making progress towards political reconciliation".

One of Mr Obama's toughest tasks would be to rebuild American relations with the world, she conceded.

"What happened in the Bush years, particularly in the early Bush years, was a precipitous drop off in European attitudes towards the United States and towards President Bush in particular.

"The polls for a number of years indicated that the frustration or the disillusion was directed primarily at President Bush. But over time, the United States and Bush came to be conflated in international popular opinion, not entirely but increasingly ... it doesn't serve American interests, and it needs to be repaired."

Miss Rice, 43, who is married with two children, was an Assistant Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton after a meteoric rise to the higher reaches of American policymaking.

Along with Tony Lake, Mr Clinton's first National Security Adviser - the key figure at the right hand of the president who co-ordinates foreign policy - Miss Rice leads a team of some 300 foreign policy advisers.

A tough, plain-speaking adviser who nevertheless has a hearty laugh and a direct, informal manner, Miss Rice is widely seen as being in line to become Mr Obama's National Security Adviser - the same role that Condoleezza Rice, now US Secretary of State, was given by George W. Bush in 2001.

But Miss Rice shrugs off the inevitable comparisons with the "other Dr Rice" - who is no relation - and won't be drawn on what position she might assume in an Obama administration.

"I have no idea who will be President Obama's National Security Adviser," she said. "I wouldn't begin to presume that.

"I wouldn't take the analogy [with Condoleezza Rice] particularly far. I respect Secretary Rice. We have a few things in common - we're African American women working in the field of national security named Rice that both have great affection for and ties to Stanford University, but beyond that I think the parallels are few."

Mr Obama is due to arrive in London on Friday night before meeting Gordon Brown at Downing Street and David Cameron, the Conservative party leader, on Saturday as well as meeting American supporters.

The centrepiece of his trip to Europe will be a major speech in Berlin, where he will arrive after stops in Jordan, Israel and the West Bank. He will then meet President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris before flying to London, where he will be for less than 24 hours.

But Miss Rice batted away the concerns of some British diplomats that the focus on Germany and the fact that Britain was not Mr Obama's first stop might signal a watering down of what Winston Churchill first described as the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States.

She still valued Churchill's term, she said. "As far back as any of us can remember, the US and Britain have cooperated hand in hand to meet some of the most significant and dangerous security challenges we face.

"Americans look to Britain as a special partner, a special ally of historical and cultural significance as well as very practical everyday significance."

The Daily Telegraph, 18 July 2008

Bill Clinton 'problem' rules out Hillary as Barack Obama's running mate

Bill Clinton, once his wife's greatest political asset, is now viewed by Barack Obama as such a liability that he is likely to scupper Hillary Clinton's chances of becoming the Democratic vice-presidential candidate.  

Washington

Sources close to the Obama campaign indicated that Mr Clinton's reluctance to disclose who has donated money to his presidential library and even concerns about possible extra-marital affairs mean that his wife would not pass the vetting procedure all potential running mates have to undergo.

"It is absolutely standard operating procedure that vice-presidential candidates today must be fully vetted," a Democratic official close to the Obama campaign told The Daily Telegraph. "That means their finances and everything about them.

"Bill Clinton's not going to submit to vetting. He has not released details of the contributors to his library or his personal finances.

"Everything has to be disclosed to the law firm overseeing this process."

"There's a questionnaire. It covers everything, including, 'Have you got any girlfriends?'"

Last week, Mr Obama told a prominent supporter of Mrs Clinton that he viewed the former president as a "complication" that made it more difficult for him to choose the former First Lady, who has made clear she would like to be on the Democratic ticket with him.

"He said once you're a president, even if you're a former president, you're always a president," Jill Iscol, a stalwart supporter of Mrs Clinton, told the Los Angeles Times.

The telephone conversation, an attempt to persuade Mrs Iscol to donate money to his general election campaign against John McCain, his Republican opponent, gave a rare glimpse into Mr Obama's secret deliberations about who to choose as his running mate.

There is little enthusiasm within the Obama campaign for selecting Mrs Clinton as a vice-presidential candidate. After a bruising primary battle, her loyalty to Mr Obama is seen as questionable and there are concerns she could alienate centrist voters. In addition, the foreign donations Mr Clinton secured for his library, his business dealings with countries like Kazakhstan and his obvious antipathy towards Mr Obama in recent months make the former president a major problem all on his own.

A Democratic strategist aligned with the Obama campaign said: "Despite the spin coming out of the Clinton campaign in the primaries, the Clintons have a very mixed reputation among independents and moderate Republicans, who are the people Barack Obama needs to convince to vote for him.

"On the Bill Clinton factor, one of the questions Senator Obama and his allies repeatedly asked during the primaries was why they wouldn't release the records for the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Library.

"Before Hillary could be considered a VP candidate, the Obama campaign would have to see those records to know how the money was raised and whether there are any ticking time bombs in there. The Clintons were pretty adamantly against it when her candidacy was on the line so it's hard to see how they'd be for it for Obama's candidacy."

Mr Obama has to perform a delicate balancing act, remaining his own man while wooing Mrs Clinton's supporters - particularly the wealthiest ones - and persuading his own donors to help pay off the more than $20 in campaign debt that the New York senator has saddled herself with.

Many of Mrs Clinton supporters, including Mrs Iscol, believe that she should be Mr Obama's running mate.

"I said [to Mr Obama] nobody has been vetted the way she has been vetted," Mrs Iscol said. "We need to pick the most qualified, wisest, smartest, experienced person to serve our country alongside of Barack Obama. And I think it's Hillary Clinton. We need her, and the party needs her, and it will be a ticket that will steamroll its way to the White House."

All the signs, however, are that Mr Obama is inclined to plump for someone else. Last week, Howard Wolfson, Mrs Clinton's campaign communications director, said that "as far as I know" the former First Lady had not been asked to hand over documents as part of a formal vetting procedure.

Others, however, have indicated that they are under active consideration. Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, Senator Clair McCaskill of Missouri and Senator Joe Biden of Deleware have all indicated that they have supplied paperwork.

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a former US army officer, and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, who supported Mrs Clinton in the primaries, are also thought to be on Mr Obama's short-list.

Mr Bayh could emerge as the ideal compromoise candidate. As a former governor, he has executive experience outside Washington while as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee he has solid foreign policy credentials.

He hails from a Mid-Western state and could thus appeal to the white working-class voters Mr Obama failed to win over against Mrs Clinton and choosing a members of the former First Lady's camp could help placate her backers.

Some Clinton supporters are angry so so few Obama donors have thus far given money to the New York senator to help her with her massive debt, more than half of which came out of her own pockets.

Mr Obama did not help matters last week when at a joint New York fundraiser with Mrs Clinton he bounced off the stage to the strains of "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" without asking people to give money to his former Democratic rival, who heartily endorsed him as a recent joint rally in Unity, New Hampshire.

Two minutes later, a sheepish Mr Obama returned to the stage and said "Hold on a second, I got one more thing" before making a belated plea for cash for Mrs Clinton.

RealClearPolitics, 12 July 2008

McCain Campaign Needs a Shot of Viagra

If there's one thing that John McCain does not want to spend time talking about, it's Viagra.

Barack Obama can make breezy stump jokes about adverts showing happy couples skipping through fields. For the 71-year-old Arizona senator, however, there's just no upside to any focus on the pharmaceutical product of choice of Bob Dole, the last battered war veteran to run - rather haplessly - for president.

But there was no excuse for McCain's excruciating discomfort when asked about Carly Fiorina, a top ally, blasting insurance companies for covering erectile dysfunction drugs but not birth control.

Her comments had already attracted controversy and the issue is one close to the hearts of many women. McCain should have had a ready, fluent response.

Instead, the eight-second pause and the protestation that he could not give an "informed answer" because he could not "recall the vote right now" played right into the narrative that McCain is old, out of touch and has been in Washington so long that he can't even remember what he's done there.

While Obama usually seems at ease and ready with a quip or a smile, in formal settings McCain can sometimes look as if he's in pain. If he does grin, he looks more like Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" than a candidate actually enjoying himself.

The Viagra episode showcased a politician with clear shortcomings in a 21st Century general election. It's one thing to get by as the maverick shooting the breeze with reporters on the Straight Talk Express when you're the underdog in New Hampshire, but it's quite another when you're the under the klieg lights as the nominee.

When asked what he would do to attract female voters, McCain could do no better than respond: "I don't have a specific policy at the moment, except to, again, I think my support of small business and the fact that I will not raise people's taxes." Not exactly an answer to inspire.

An even more serious problem for McCain is what the Viagra episode revealed about his broader campaign. Prepping him for the question was a basic piece of campaign staff work that had apparently been overlooked.

The gaffe could have been avoided, furthermore, if Fiorina had not denounced a policy that her own candidate had voted for in the Senate.

Hers wasn't even the worst gaffe by a top McCain surrogate this week. Phil Gramm's ramblings about a "national of whiners" and a "mental recession" were a gift for Obama - insulting the voters and denying an economic slump that working Americans know is not just in their minds.

After previously admitting that the economy was not his strong subject, McCain could have certainly done without that. And by denying that Gramm, his most senior economic adviser, was speaking for him, McCain's reputation for straight talk took a bit of a hit.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the mistakes are not just tactical. As well as being disorganized, his campaign lacks strategic direction and its messaging can at times be inept.

Describing Obama as a "typical politician" and "just another politician" seems a woefully inadequate response to his astute move to the centre. If anything, it helps blunt a potential Obama weakness - that he lacks the experience to operate in Washington. And the Illinois senator's race, charisma and compelling life story make it that much more unlikely this type of label will stick.

Rudy Giuliani, another McCain ally, tried a different tack last week when, responding to Obama's remark that Americans need to learn foreign languages as much as immigrants need to learn English, he suggested that Obama was capturing an "anti-American feeling", as illustrated by his popularity in Europe.

Obama certainly has vulnerabilities on foreign policy, and the concerns from Chancellor Angela Merkel about a possible Obama speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin illustrate the dangers his faces on his European trip. Any suggestion of electioneering abroad - or a visible manifestation European Obamamania - could be very bad politics in the American heartland.

But the charge that Obama's popular campaign is the result of capturing some "an anti-American feeling" is highly unlikely to wash. His story is in many ways the quintessential American Dream - mixed race, raised by a single mother on food stamps and by his grandparents, a political nonentity just eight years ago who could not get a convention floor pass.

The Republican strategist Alex Castellanos recently told me what he believed the Republican bumper sticker against Obama should be: "A risky choice in an uncertain world."

With an ailing economy, unpopular war and unpopular Republican president and in face of superior Democratic enthusiasm and fundraising, that might not be enough to win the White House. It would, however, be a more coherent message than anything Team McCain has come up with.

He's already had a staff reshuffle but McCain's campaign is in dire need of a shot of political Viagra.

RealClearPolitics, 28 June 2008

Emulating the Man From Hope

Republicans with a predilection for wishful thinking had been supposing that John McCain's opponent in November was going to be another Jimmy Carter or Mike Dukakis. But although Barack Obama might not have been able to get him on the phone this week, the new Messiah of Hope has been doing a passable of emulating the Man from Hope.

In January 1992, Bill Clinton flew back from the campaign trail to Arkansas to send Ricky Ray Rector to his Maker. A retarded double murderer who had lobotomized himself with his own gun, Ray told his guards to save the pecan pie from his last meal so he could finish it after the lethal injection.

The execution enraged the Left. By 2002, the Supreme Court had ruled that such state killings were unconstitutional. Clinton's sanctioning of it may have reeked of cynicism but it was masterful politics.

Still fresh in the memory was Dukakis's bloodless and bureaucratic answer to Bernard Shaw of CNN's debate question about whether he would back the death penalty if his wife Kitty was raped and murdered. At a stroke, Clinton proved that he was no Dukakis.

Obama's a Mid-western senator rather than a Southern governor so he won't have the opportunity Clinton had to fly back home to order the execution of a retarded man. But he did have the next best thing this week - the Supreme Court's 5 to 4 decision that quashed the execution of a Louisiana man who raped his eight-year-old daughter.

Without a blink, Obama aligned himself with the Court's four conservative justices - John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito - who had voted to uphold the death penalty for child rape. The father of girls aged nine and seven, he seized the opportunity to display populist revulsion and take a hard line against a despicable crime. Not for him the cool rationalism of Dukakis.

The following day, Obama had another chance to align himself with Scalia and Co rather than Stephen Breyer, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg - the kind of justices he's indicated he favors.

Showing a determination not to become another Al Gore - whose opposition to gun rights arguably cost him the 2000 election - Obama spoke warmly of the decision to overturn the District of Columbia's handgun ban.

Throw in his jilting of the Netroots by supporting the FISA bill and his decision to abandon his pledge to seek a public funding deal with McCain and it's clear that Obama is determined to appeal to the Centre and elements of the Right.

Ensuring he's covered all bases with respect to losing Democratic presidential candidates, Obama's also been doing his best to prove he's no John Kerry. Giving notice he won't be Swiftboated, he said last week that "if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun".

Cue howls of derision from the Left and cries of, 'What happened to the politics of hope?' That's a legitimate question. But after Carter, Walter Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry what Democrats want most is a winner. Having already cornered the market on hope and change - no matter what Obama does, McCain's not going to take that away from him - he needed to prove he was tough enough.

To have accepted public funding and its accompanying spending limits would have been an insane act of unilateral disarmament. Yes, there's a danger of Obama sullying his hopemonger reputation and coming across as just another politician. But who has ever won the White House without being political?

Obama has worked deftly to court Hillary Clinton and her voters without deferring to them and appearing weak. While telling female members of the Congressional Black Caucus to "get over it" might have been going a touch too far, his reminder that Camp Clinton had portrayed him as a Muslim and not ready to be commander-in-chief.

By refusing to bow to the new Conventional Wisdom that poor Hillary fell victim to a wave of Obama-inspired sexism, he solidified his position as Democratic alpha male.

Although the media's working assumption has been that this will be a general election as close as those of 2004 and 2000, there are signs that Obama is building the foundation for a resounding victory. Four months is an eternity in politics and anything can happen but McCain supporters are right to be gloomy at the moment.

Some national polls give Obama a sizeable lead. But more worrying for Republicans are the state polls, which show Obama having an edge in Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado and Michigan with Florida, Missouri and Nevada within striking distance. Should the currrent state polling trends continue, Obama could be headed for a landslide in November.

Meanwhile, McCain seems strangely off form. While telling reporters that he was "very pleased" with the Supreme Court's gun decision, he looked barely happier than he did when being held prisoner in Vietnam. An emerging storyline of a man who never uses the internet and takes weekends off - though heaven forfend anyone making his 71 years an issue - needs to be nipped in the bud before it begins to define him.

Bill Clinton wasn't in Unity, New Hampshire yesterday when Obama and his wife staged their show of togetherness. And it may be quite some time before we see the former president stumping for the Illinois senator.

Obama secured the Democratic nomination in part by disavowing the "old politics" of Bill Clinton. But the way he's begun his general election campaign shows that he's convinced that emulating the Man from Hope is the way to win in November.

The Daily Telegraph, 27 June 2008

Justice Antonin Scalia: Al Gore to blame for 2000 US election mess

The 2000 presidential election debacle was the fault of Al Gore, who should have followed Richard Nixon's 1960 example and conceded without legal action, according to the Supreme Court's leading conservative judge.

 Washington

"Richard Nixon, when he lost to [John F.] Kennedy thought that the election had been stolen in Chicago, which was very likely true with the system at the time," Justice Antonin Scalia told The Telegraph.

"But he did not even think about bringing a court challenge. That was his prerogative. So you know if you don't like it, don't blame it on me.

"I didn't bring it into the courts. Mr Gore brought it into the courts.

"So if you don't like the courts getting involved talk to Mr Gore."

Justice Scalia insisted that his controversial decision, along with four other justices, to stop votes being recounted in Florida because the method was unconstitutional and it was too late to consider other options was "absolutely right".

He was speaking during an interview about his book Making the Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.

A strict "textualist", he rejects the notion of a "living constitution", arguing instead that the original intentions of its framers should be closely adhered to.

Once a voice in the wilderness, Justice Scalia now often finds himself in a narrow majority on the Supreme Court, such as in a landmark gun control case in which he wrote for the 5-4 majority that the framers of the constitution believed in individual gun rights.

In December 2000, seven of the nine Supreme Court justices ruled that the recount method was unfair but only five, including Justice Scalia, decided that another recount was impractical and George W. Bush should therefore become president.

The 2000 election, in which Mr Bush eventually prevailed in pivotal Florida by just 537 votes, remains a potent source of discontent for Democrats. Last month, Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said that the election had been stolen by "five intellectually bankrupt judges".

In 1960, Mr Kennedy won Illinois by just 8,858 votes and there were also allegations of voter fraud in Texas, where he won by 46,257 votes. If Mr Nixon had won both states he would have reached the White House eight years before he beat Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

Mr Kennedy's Illinois victory came from Chicago's Cook County, where he won by a stunning 450,000 votes.

There have long been allegations that Mayor Richard Daley, a Kennedy ally, and his Chicago Democratic "machine" engaged in large-scale electoral fraud.

Mr Nixon conceded the election to Mr Kennedy rather than going to the courts.

Justice Scalia, a conservative justice who was appointed to America's highest court by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, said he and the other justices had no option but to intervene once Mr Gore sought to overcome Mr Bush via the lower courts.

He said that he "of course" regretted that the Supreme Court had become involved. "But I don't know how we could have avoided it. Could we have declined to accept the case on the basis that it wasn't important enough?

"And you know bear in mind that the issue wasn't whether or not the election was going to be decided by a court or not. It was whether it was going to be decided by the Florida court or by the United States Supreme Court, for a federal election.

"So I have no regrets about taking the case and I think our decision in the case was absolutely right. But if you ask me 'Am I sorry it all happened?' Of course I am sorry it happened there was no way that we were going to come out of it smelling like a rose.

"I mean, one side or the other was going to feel that was a politicised decision but that goes with the territory."

He flatly denied there was any "partisan prejudice" involved in the 5-4 ruling, adding that "if you want to look for partisan decisions" then they could be found in the Florida supreme court's rulings.

Justice Scalia said he thought that the United States was "over-lawed", leading to too many lawyers in the country.

"I don't think our legal system should be that complex. I think that any system that requires that many of the country's best minds, and they are the best minds, is too complex.

"If you look at the figures, where does the top of the class in college go to? It goes into law. They don't go into teaching. Now I love the law, there is nothing I would rather do but it doesn't produce anything."

Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner is published by Thomson/West price $29.95

RealClearPolitics, 06 June 2008

Obama-Hillary Ticket? Ain't Gonna Happen

Imagine it is January 21st 2009. You are President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is your vice-president.

She's already demanded her old office back in the West Wing. You've learned from CNN that Bill Clinton is on a jet with Ron Burkle heading for Kazakhstan. Drudge has a flashing siren up beside a report from a British tabloid about a mystery blonde who emerged from the former president's apartment in at his library in Little Rock just before dawn last week. The blonde is promising a full interview tomorrow.

Mark Penn, White House counselor, is busy polling whether a divorce or a brief separation from Bill might best help the former First Lady become in 2012 the first member of a president's own administration to defeat him for his party's nomination.

The new vice-president's case is bolstered because your margin of victory was barely wider than George W. Bush's in 2000. According to exit polls released after John McCain's popular vote win, 78 per cent of late deciders cited the leaked tape of Hillary calling you a "wimp" as a key factor. Some 64 per cent agreed with her.

For months, the pundits have been ridiculing the Obama-Hillary (she insisted on her first name) slogan of "Ready for Change and Experience We Can Believe In on Day One". Bill Clinton's Labor Day quip that it would be a "three-for-one" deal didn't help either.

OK, stop imagining. An exaggeration? Certainly. But you get the picture. If Obama even begins to consider whether a Vice President Clinton would loyally help him better govern the country, she's toast in the veepstakes.

Which is why the notion that Hillary will get the nod can be summed up in three words. Ain't. Gonna. Happen. She may be on anyone's short list, as Obama has stated cannily. But she's already inked in at the bottom of his.

Let's face it, the chances were never high. Underpinning Obama's campaign has been his potent argument that it's time for fundamental change in Washington - an end to triangulation, the politics of personal destruction and, by implication, an end to the dynastic rule of the Bushes and the Clintons. Oh, and an end to the Iraq war - which Hillary authorised.

Obama's top advisers believe she sought to diminish him and at best failed to rein in supporters and allies who played the race card or encouraged the ignorant and gullible to view him as some kind of Muslim fifth columnist. She even said that McCain was ready to be commander-in-chief and Obama wasn't.

Electorally, moreover, the benefits of her being on the ticket are dubious. The vast majority of her 18 million voters are likely to plump for him anyway if he runs even a half-decent general election campaign. Those Appalachian types who backed Hillary in the primaries after baulking at a black man won't vote for Obama no matter who's at the bottom of the ticket.

It's easy to forget that Hillary remains one of the most polarising figures in American politics. Naming her as running mate would mobilise the Republican base for McCain more quickly than if the angels Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley descended from heaven to anoint the Arizona senator live on C-SPAN.

In his baroque rant about Todd Purdum this week, Bill Clinton's accusations about Obama got relatively little attention. "They had all these people standing up in this church cheering, calling Hillary a white racist, and he didn't do anything about it," he vented to the Huffington Post. "The first day he [Obama] said 'Ah, ah, ah well.' Because that's what they do - he gets other people to slime her."

If those words had been uttered publicly by Frances Strickland or Susan Bayh do you think their hubbies would still be in the veepstakes reckoning? And that's even before you consider Bill's foreign financial deals and the undisclosed donors to his library.

All this is leaving aside what happened this week. Hillary didn't only display a breathtaking - though characteristically Clintonian - self-pity, delusion, sense of entitlement and blatant desire to put her own good above that of her party. She also showed an astonishing political ineptitude.

The test of a true leader is how he or she performs under the pressure of dramatic events. Her self-regarding defiance was the worst political misjudgment by a leading Democrat since Al Gore blew the 2000 election by conceding when Florida was still in the balance.

To authorize the likes of Bob Johnson (whose charming contributions to the election cycle thus far have been to call Obama a "Sidney Poitier", allude to his youthful drug use and state he would not have been beating Hillary had he been white) to lobby for the vice-presidential slot is plain stupid. And then denying it all in a press statement fooled no one.

For Obama to opt for Hillary over candidates such as Sam Nunn, Jim Webb, Tim Kaine, Mark Warner, Joe Biden and Wesley Clark would be an acknowledgement of weakness. It would also indicate a decidely uncharacteristic lack of confidence.

The Illinois senator's primary campaign was remarkably well disciplined, consistent, on message and lacking in drama. Despite Hillary's undoubted mastery of policy minutiae and her impressive fighting spirit, her campaign exhibited none of these qualities.

Obama will need to pay due deference to his vanquished rival's bruised feelings while deftly courting her angry, disappointed supporters. But he's not about to gamble everything by bowing to her presumptuous and preposterous demand.

The Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2008

Barack Obama tells Jewish voters of his support for Israel

Visiting a synagogue to face Jews sceptical about his Muslim family background and overtures to Iran, Senator Barack Obama pleaded: “Don’t vote against me because of who I am.”

Boca Raton, lorida

As part of his general election strategy against John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, the Democratic presidential candidate is painstakingly courting those constituencies who have thus far remained largely resistant to his charms.

After his appearance before the B’nai Torah Congregation in Boca Raton, centre of Florida’s influential Jewish community, Mr Obama travelled to Miami today (Fri) to address the Cuban American National Foundation, which is wary of his promise to end the ban on Americans travelling to Cuba.

Over the next few days, Mr Obama is increasingly concentrating on the general election, visiting swing states such as Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado.

Mr Obama appeared uncharacteristically nervous during the two-hour event in the synagogue, remarking after his opening address: “I suspect there may be people who are supporting other candidates in this audience and that’s great - I want the toughest questions available.”

Several of those gathered took up the challenge as he took question for well over an hour after he had proclaimed his “unshakable commitment to maintaining that bond between the United States and Israel and an unshakable commitment to Israel’s security” and “deep affinity with the idea of social justice...embodied in the Jewish faith".

Right off the bat, he was asked about his name by a man who said he had a friend who would vote for him if he was called Barry instead of Barack. Mr Obama responded that it was true that many people would say he had “kind of a Muslim-sounding name and we don’t know what’s going on here".

He said that voters “shouldn’t worry about the name because my understanding is in Hebrew it actually means lightning", adding: “You’ve had a prime minister named Barack [Ehud Barak] in Israel. It should be pretty familiar to this audience.”

He also noted that “Barack” shared a root with the Hebrew word “baruch” or blessed.

Another questioner rattled off a long list of associations with supporters of the Palestinian cause, including Rashid Khalidi, an academic at Columbia University and named Jewish victims of terrorism before asking Mr Obama for a list of Jews who could vouch for him.

Mr Obama was irked by the question, responding: “I have to be very cautious about this,” Mr. Obama said, “because you remember the old stereotype, ’I’m not prejudiced, some of my best friends are Jewish,’ right? ’I’m not prejudiced, some of my best friends are black.’ “ But he duly listed a number of supporters, university professors and political advisers who were Jewish and strong supporters of Israel.

Outside the synagogue, there was a vociferous group of Jewish protesters, several of whom said they supported Mr McCain. “You are what your friends are and the company you keep is how I judge you,” said Eli Albert, 17.

"Two friends he’s had for 20 years have been the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and also Louis Farrakhan. Both of those have clearly stated they’re anti-Israel and I can’t stand for that. Israel is where my heart is.”

Mr Obama recently cut tied with Mr Wright, his former minister, and he has never been a friend of Mr Farrakhan, though the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam has endorsed his candidacy.

Inside the synagogue, Mr Obama urged the congregation to keep an open mind. “We’ve got to be careful about guilt by association. The tradition of the Jewish people is to judge me by what I say and what I’ve done.”

Exit polls have shown that Mr Obama’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton beat him convincingly among Jewish voters. But the Illinois senator’s aides take comfort in other polls that show he leads Mr McCain among Jews - who tened to vote Democratic - by two to one.

"A lot of it is to do with a lack of familiarity and in politics people like to play on fears,” said David Axelrod, Mr Obama’s chief strategists, who is Jewish and was sporting a badge that said “Obama ’08” in Hebrew.

"But I think the more the community has the opportunity to see him, to hear him, to understand where he comes from, that will dissipate.”

Clarifying a comment last year that he would meet President Ahmadinejad of Iran “without preconditions", Mr Axelrod said: “His point is that if you can advance the cause of this country and the cause of peace by sitting down then he would do that.”

But he added that “being willing” to meet Mr Ahmadinejad, who denies the Holocaust and wants to destroy Israel, did that mean that “he will".

Mr Obama said that he felt pained by tensions between the black and Jewish communities. “Don’t judge me because I’ve got a funny name,” he said in conclusion. “Don’t judge me because I’m African-American. It’s time for us to get past this.”

The Daily Telegraph, 23 May 2008

Hillary Clinton says sexism to blame for White House setbacks

In the dying days of her presidential campaign, Senator Hillary Clinton is encouraging her supporters to believe that sexists and misogynists are conspiring to deny the former First Lady her rightful place in the White House.

Coral Gables, Florida

Her defiant speeches are peppered with references to her gender. She told a crowd of some 3,000 - more than two thirds of them women - in Coral Gables, Florida, that America needed "a president who will roll up her sleeves and get to work for you" and a woman to "clean house" in Washington.

Mrs Clinton's main remaining chance of beating her Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, lies in persuading the vast majority of about 200 undecided super-delegates - party officials - to reverse the elected delegate tally, which the Illinois senator has already won.

Making an explicit pitch to "any delegate or so-called super-delegate" in Coral Gables, she said: "Look at the states I've won. Look at the states I'm leading in. Look at the electoral map. It is clear I'm the stronger candidate against John McCain."

In addition, she needs the Democratic party to change the rules of the primary election so that disallowed votes cast in Michigan, where Mr Obama's name was not on the ballot, and Florida, where no campaigning took place, should count.

Travelling to Florida this week, she tried to splice together anger among Democrats that their primary had been invalidated because it was scheduled too early and outrage among mainly older women that one of their own had been rebuffed by a young man.

Media coverage of the presidential race, Mrs Clinton told The Washington Post, has been "deeply offensive to millions of women".

Pundits have been obsessed, she said, with the idea that racism was a barrier to her Democratic rival becoming the first black president of the United States. "But it does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by comments and reactions of people who are nothing but misogynists," she said.

Her argument resonated with many in Coral Gables. "I'm horrified with the mainstream," said Shannen Davis, 52, a social worker. "Until Senator Clinton ran for office, I had no idea that they were misogynist, biased, women-haters who have been waiting for this chance to throw all their jabs at a woman."

Kathy Ryan, 67, a retired teacher and local Democratic officials also blamed the media. "If they're women, they're Obama women who want her out. If it's men, the basis of it seems to be sexist. It's subtle but it's there," she said.

"Unless you're a woman, you're not sensitised to it but those of us who've had to live with it for many years understand it."

Mrs Clinton has not tried explicitly to link Mr Obama with the barrage of sexism she believes she has suffered from. But she has argued that sexism is a much bigger problem than racism.

"You can go to places in the world where there are no racial distinctions except everyone is joined together in their oppression of women," she said this week.

"The treatment of women is the single biggest problem we have politically and socially in the world. If you look at the extremism and the fundamentalism, it is all about controlling women, at its base."

Throughout the nomination battle, the Clinton campaign has pushed the message that the media is rooting for Mr Obama. It's a small leap, therefore, for many of her supporters to believe that her rival has been directing the media to be sexist or is himself dismissive of women.

Karen Orlin, 60, a corporate lawyer, said that when Mr Obama recently addressed a female journalist as "sweetie" it was a deliberate slight.

"I take great offence at that and I think it was unfair gamesmanship," she said. "There have been many comments, the references to emotionalism, the references to her passion. On the surface they're flattering but if you parse the language he's using it's actually very demeaning."

Although the Democratic party has all but anointed Mr Obama as its nominee, Mrs Clinton continues to assail him - though no longer by name - and highlight the attributes she believes she has and he does not.

She has outlined what "I will specifically do", she said in Coral Gables, dressed in an aquamarine pantsuit and looking every bit as energetic as she did when her campaign started in Iowa some 15 months ago.

"I want everybody to understand the choice in this election. I come with a lifetime of experience, a record of actually accomplishing change for people who needed someone in their corner."

Amid cries of "You go, girl" and waving signs that depicted her as the feminist icon Rosie the Riveter, she implored her supporters: "Stay with me - let's make history together."

Her supporters professed themselves awed by her tenacity.

"She's made of steel," said Ms Davis. "She's been tested in the fire and she's never wavered, never bowed.

"They have no idea who they're dealing with. It's not over until she decides it's over and that will be at the end of the inauguration party she'll be throwing next January. She's going to go all the way."

The Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2008

Vote for Mom not Obama, Chelsea Clinton tells students

Summerdale, Pennsylvania

Hillary Clinton, struggling to contain a tidal wave of youth support for Barack Obama is dispatching the most trusted person in her life to implore university students to give her a chance - her daughter Chelsea.

Miss Clinton 28, has taken leave from her New York job with a hedge fund to campaign relentlessly for her mother.

Shielded by her parents' minders, she tries to keep out of the national spotlight but has held more than 100 events at university campuses across the country.

Dressed in jeans and a fitted jacket, Miss Clinton is confident, poised and, like her mother, a font of arcane policy detail. A more disciplined but less passionate campaigner than her father Bill, she gives almost identical answers at each stop.

Whether speaking about "my mom's strong record of supporting Israel", "my mom's plan on the green energy bill" or how healthcare has been "an abiding passion of my mom's life", she is never stuck for an answer, even to the occasional question about the sexual scandals involving her father.

Despite the recent controversy over Mr Obama's remark that people in mid-western small towns "cling" to religion and guns because they are "bitter", Mrs Clinton is slipping further behind in national polls.

The polls in Pennsylvania, which votes on Tuesday, are too close for comfort. Defeat in the state would almost certainly doom her White House campaign while a narrow win might well be judged a de facto victory for Mr Obama.

Record numbers of new, young voters give Mr Obama some hope of an unlikely upset, even though Mrs Clinton spent part of her childhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania and the predominance of white, working class voters makes it ideal turf for her.

Although she is now the same age as when her father first ran for political office, Miss Clinton has declined to speak to any journalist, even a nine-year-old "kid reporter" who approached her in Iowa.

Aides quiz people in the crowd who are clearly beyond university age to check whether they are with the press. When a dishevelled looking man wearing a tweed jacket started to ask a question at a Mississippi event, one of the Clinton aides shouted: "Hey, that's a reporter asking a question!"

But it turned out he was a community worker. Like her father, Miss Clinton is taking part in four events a day in Pennsylvania this week, a punishing schedule as she is driven by bus from town to town.

But there are signs that the notion she might prove to be her mother's secret weapon may well have been too optimistic. She faces an uphill task among youg voters, who support Mr Obama by a whopping 73 to 21 per cent among voters aged 18 to 29.

The crowds Miss Clinton attracts are often no more than 200. At an event at Central Pennsylvania College in Summerdale on Wednesday there was barely that number and more than half were pupils from a local high school, most of them too young to vote.

In Mechanicsburg on Monday night, Miss Clinton arrived well over an hour late - a characteristic inherited form her father - and did not apologise to the 150 people gathered shivering in the dark at the village playground.

Her microphone didn't work, prompting shouts of "Speak up!" and she was heckled by youths carrying "Clinton Go Home" signs and shouting "Vote Ron Paul!" and "Chelsea, you're hot!"

Badly-planned events are often a sign of poor "field work" by a campaign and superior field organisation by Mr Obama's staff has been a principal factor in the victories that have brought him to the stage where the Democratic nomination is almost within his grasp.

Before Miss Clinton arrived, small yellow Frisbees with the words "It's Your Future. It's Bright!" printed on them were handed out. Her answers were fluent, if laden with jargon, and she spoke for 40 minutes.

But many of the students were unmoved. Lauren Witte, 19, said many more had turned out to see the actors Dule Hill, from The West Wing and Zachary Quinto, due to star in the new Star Trek film when they came to stump for Mr Obama.

"There's no split - everyone's pretty much for Obama. He's laid back, you can relate to him, but Hillary is too prim and proper and America's not like that any more."

Her boyfriend Sebastian Eichler, 19, interjected: "Hillary's uptight." Chris Bower, 20, said that most students were voting for Mr Obama.

"I'm undecided but the way Obama presents himself, it seems like he's talking as if he's one of us. Chelsea was pretty good today but it's like Hillary sent her just because she has to if she wants to win."

The Daily Telegraph, 7 April 2008

Martin Luther King anniversary stokes black fears of Barack Obama assassination

Memphis

Four decades after Martin Luther King was murdered, black Americans are torn between the hope that Barack Obama will reach the White House and the fear that he too could fall to an assassin's bullet.

Electing the first black president of the United States would be a dramatic step in achieving Dr King's dream of racial equality.

But the anniversary of the 1968 slaying of the civil rights icon at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis is a painful reminder of just how fragile that dream remains.

"You know it [an assassination of Mr Obama] can happen," the Reverend Billy Kyles, 73, who spent the last hour of Dr King's life with him, told The Daily Telegraph.

"It has happened for blacks who have done less than get that close to the presidency.

"The closer he [Mr Obama] gets to it, we think in many cases that it's more likely that it's going to happen."

Rev Kyles, pastor of the Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis for the past 49 years, was with Dr King and another preacher, Ralph Abernathy, who died in 1990, in Room 306 of the motel for the hour before the assassination.

"Martin Luther King had preached himself through the fear of death and that day he was a different guy – light-hearted, he was telling jokes. It was just three guys kind of hanging out."

Shortly before 6pm, he and Dr King went out onto the balcony and looked out over the supporters gathered below.

"I said, 'Guys, come on let's go, we have a rally tonight'. I had just walked to go down the stairs. I got about five steps and the shot rang out – kerpow!."

He looked around to see Dr King on the floor.

"I rushed to his side. There was a tremendous hole in the side of his face, there was a big wound under his shirt that I could not see and there was just so much blood …I remembered my father dying and his colour changing in death. I saw that same thing with Martin Luther King."

Dr King was 39.

Mr Obama, 46, was given full Secret Service protection last May.

It was the earliest juncture for any presidential candidate since the practice was first introduced following the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, two months after Dr King died from a shot fired by James Earl Ray, an escaped convict and racist.

The prospect of Mr Obama meeting a similar fate is etched deep in the collective psyche of many American blacks, particularly those old enough to remember the events of 1968, who overwhelmingly back the Illinois senator over his rival Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

Mr Obama tells anyone who raises the subject to "stop worrying" and take comfort in the knowledge that neither Dr King nor Senator Kennedy had the Secret Service with them.

Though his wife Michelle has spoken of safety concerns, the candidate himself plays them down – partly for fear that some might be dissuaded from voting for him because of a misguided notion of protecting him.

Last month, when his motorcade sped past Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in 1963, Mr Obama said he was too busy focussing on the speech he was about to give even to register what had happened there.

Mrs Clinton and John McCain, the Republican nominee, are to travel to Memphis for the 40th anniversary commemorations on Friday.

Mr Obama was due to be campaigning that day in Muncie, the Indiana town where on April 4th 1968 Senator Kennedy broke the news to a stunned crowd that Dr King was dead.

His campaign, however, has postponed the Muncie event citing "logistical issues".

At the main bus station in Memphis, a city blighted by urban decay and split evenly between blacks and whites, the grim prospect of Mr Obama's assassination was raised several times without prompting.

"People say that if he makes it, someone will have him killed," said Cheryle Boyd, 47, a cleaner.

"They say it would be the Ku Klux Klan or maybe the Mafia, the ones that got John F. Kennedy. I'm trying not to let it worry me. I pray that if he is elected then he serves his time and goes on with his life. But he's black and if he wins the presidency over a Caucasian then it would be trouble.

"There's some I know that has voted for Hillary because they say that Obama wouldn't last a year."

Gregory Jiles, 44, a concrete factory worker, said: "We've talked about it at work. If he's elected then it would be a beautiful thing. For us to be able to vote for him is the opportunity of a lifetime but if something happened to him it would prove that the United States hadn't moved forward at all."

Sheryl Goens, 59, a physical therapist, said: "It would be very dangerous for Obama to be elected. He stands for a lot of the same things Martin Luther King stood for plus the Kennedy's are backing him."

Rev Kyles urged people to overcome their anxieties.

"You have to put those fears aside and let the Secret Service do their job."

The worry about an assassination, he suggested, was linked to the early assumption among many blacks that Mr Obama could not win the White House.

"I've almost had to de-programme my own mind. I was saying, 'He'll run a good race but he won't succeed'. But it's kept lasting and lasting and lasting. Wow, this is exciting.

"One of the thrills I got was seeing people holding out little white babies for him to kiss."

What would Dr King think of Mr Obama's campaign?

"He'd be jubilant. And I am too. I knew it would happen but I didn't know when and I wasn't expecting it this soon

The Daily Telegraph, 13 March 2008

Hillary Clinton: I was 'instrumental' in Northern Ireland peace process

Washington

Hillary Clinton, accused last week by a Nobel Peace Prize winner of exaggerating her claims of having "helped" bring peace to Northern Ireland, has raised the stakes by stating she was "instrumental" in doing so.

The former First Lady laughed and dismissed criticisms she had inflated her foreign policy experience in Northern Ireland and Bosnia as "nitpicking" on Thursday.

When asked by National Public Radio whether she had been in the "centre of the room" during Northern Ireland peace talks, she said: "What I was was part of a team and that team included obviously the principal negotiators under the direct authority of my husband.

"I wasn't sitting at the negotiating table but the role I played was instrumental. I guess it was in December when Ian Paisley [Democratic Unionist Party leader] and Martin McGuinness [Sinn Fein leader] came to the United States.

"I think they met with the leadership of Congress, with the President and with me and they thanked me publicly for the role I had played."

But Mrs Clinton's version of events has been challenged by Peter King, an Ulster Unionist Party negotiator at the Good Friday talks in 1998, who said: "Hillary Clinton was totally invisible at the actual negotiations.

"As far as I am concerned, Mrs Clinton was as relevant to peace in Northern Ireland as Tony Blair's wife or the ex-wife of Bertie Ahern [the Irish prime minister]."

Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party in 1998, told The Daily Telegraph last week that Mrs Clinton's claims were a "wee bit silly".

This month, Terry McAuliffe, Mrs Clinton's campaign chairman, told CNN: "We would not have peace today had it not for Hillary's hard work in Northern Ireland."

Both Unionist and Nationalist negotiators told this newspaper that while Mrs Clinton's work with women's groups was positive her overall role was peripheral and she played no part in the gruelling negotiations that took years.

Mr Paisley boycotted the talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, though he has since become the province's First Minister.

Greg Craig, a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama who served in President Bill Clinton's administration at the time of the talks, said the "inflated" claim called into question Mrs Clinton's judgement.

"Did the Irish have anything to do with this?...I'm not aware she solved any of the many, many thorny problems that had to be resolved, whether it was disarmament or whatever."

He cited accounts of the Northern Ireland talks by George Mitchell, who chaired them, and Madeleine Albright, then US Secretary of State, that hardly featured Mrs Clinton.

"If you look at the books that deal with the American side she doesn't figure in any significant way, certainly not instrumental."

The Daily Telegraph, 8 March 2008

Nobel winner: Hillary Clinton's 'silly' Irish peace claims

Washington

Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.

"I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [ Clinton] going around," he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely "the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets" during elections. "She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player."

Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am.

"I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland," she told CNN on Wednesday. But negotiators from the parties that helped broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told The Daily Telegraph that her role was peripheral and that she played no part in the gruelling political talks over the years.

Lord Trimble shared the Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume, leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, in 1998. Conall McDevitt, an SDLP negotiator and aide to Mr Hume during the talks, said: "There would have been no contact with her either in person or on the phone. I was with Hume regularly during calls in the months leading up to the Good Friday Agreement when he was taking calls from the White House and they were invariably coming from the president."

Central to Mrs Clinton’s claim of an important Northern Ireland role is a meeting she attended in Belfast in with a group of women from cross-community groups. "I actually went to Northern Ireland more than my husband did," she said in Nashua, New Hampshire on January 6th.

"I remember a meeting that I pulled together in Belfast, in the town hall there, bringing together for the first time Catholics and Protestants from both traditions, having them sitting a room where they had never been before with each other because they don’t go to school together, they don’t live together and it was only in large measure because I really asked them to come that they were there.

"And I wasn’t sure it was going to be very successful and finally a Catholic woman on one side of the table said, ’You know, every time my husband leaves for work in the morning I worry he won’t come home at night.

"And then a Protestant woman on the other side said, ’Every time my son tries to go out at night I worry he won’t come home again’. And suddenly instead of seeing each other as caricatures and stereotypes they saw each other as human beings and the slow, hard work of peace-making could move forward."

There is no record of a meeting at Belfast City Hall, though Mrs Clinton attended a ceremony there when her husband turned on the Christmas tree lights in November 1995. The former First Lady appears to be referring a 50-minute event the same day, arranged by the US Consulate, the same day at the Lamp Lighter Café on the city’s Ormeau Road.

The "Belfast Telegraph" reported the next day that the café meeting was crammed with reporters, cameramen and Secret Service agents. Conversation "seemed a little bit stilted, a little prepared at times" and Mrs Clinton admired a stainless steel tea pot, which was duly given to her, for keeping the brew "so nice and hot".

Among those attending were women from groups representing single parents, relationship counsellors, youth workers and a cultural society. In her 2003 autobiography "Living History", Mrs Clinton wrote about the meeting in some detail but made no claim that it was significant.

Rather than it being the first time the women had met, Mrs Clinton wrote: "Because they were willing to work across the religious divide, they had found common ground." Mary Fox, the wife of a former IRA prisoner and one of the seven women at the meeting, said she had been there on behalf of the Footprints community centre. "It was quite a political change for the women’s sector after the visit of Hillary Clinton. We would love to see her as president. She spoke to each of us and was very interested in our work. She was lovely."

Mr McDevitt said: "I’ve always had a theory that these people were already well networked. Maybe they needed a bit of bringing together and she [Mrs Clinton] was an ideal focus point." Once a peace deal was in place, Mrs Clinton supported women politicians and was always available if they visited Washington "to give them a pat on the back, give them moral support", he added.

"So in a classic woman politicky sort of way I think she was active...She was certainly investing some time, no doubt about it. Whether she was involved on the issue side I think probably not." Some of the people Mrs Clinton met went on to help found the Women’s Coalition, which took part in the Good Friday talks. Lord Trimble said: "The Women’s Coalition will think they were important. Other people beg to differ."

Steven King, a negotiator with Lord Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party, argued that Mrs Clinton might even have helped delay the chances of peace. "She was invited along to some pre-arranged meetings but I don’t think she exactly brought anybody together that hadn’t been brought together already," he said. Mrs Clinton was "a cheerleader for the Irish republican side of the argument", he added.

"She really lost all credibility when on Bill Clinton’s last visit to Northern Ireland [in December 2000] when she hugged and kissed [Sinn Fein leaders] Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness."

Responding to inquiries from this newspaper, Hillary Clinton’s campaign issued a statement from Mr Hume. "I am quite surprised that anyone would suggest that Hillary Clinton did not perform important foreign policy work as First Lady," the statement said.

"I can state from firsthand experience that she played a positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland. She visited Northern Ireland, met with very many people and gave very decisive support to the peace process.

"There is no doubt that the people of Northern Ireland think very positively of Hillary Clinton’s support for our peace process, due to her visits to Northern Ireland and her meetings with so many people. In private she made countless calls and contacts, speaking to leaders and opinion makers on all sides, urging them to keep moving forward."

The Daily Telegraph, 6 March 2008

Columbus , Ohio

There were shrieks of delight at the front of Hillary Clinton's campaign plane as she entered the first class cabin just before 1am at the moment the television networks declared she had won Texas.

Aides clutching wine glasses charged with Yellow Tail Cabernet Sauvignon punched the air. She grinned broadly and hugged her daughter Chelsea while the plane prepared to taxi along the runway at Cleveland bound for Washington DC.

But the smiles and congratulations - as well as the kind words for Barack Obama, whom she never mentions in defeat - will be temporary.

Mrs Clinton knows that her path to the Democratic nomination remains long, extremely rocky and the odds are still stacked against her achieving her goal.

Doug Hattaway, a Clinton spokesman, declared over a microphone that the fight would go on to the bitter finish.

"Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life," he told the bleary-eyed reporters contemplating covering an endless campaign.

After yet another stunning comeback - the first was in New Hampshire, an eternity of two months ago - it is tempting to ascribe almost diabolically supernatural powers to Hillary and Bill Clinton, who appear to rise from the grave every time the pundits begin to administer the funeral rites. The reality, however, is more prosaic.

She won in Ohio and Texas by employing a dual "kitchen strategy". She hammered away at Mr Obama on what she described as economic "kitchen table" issues.

At the same time, she unleashed a negative onslaught in which her rival grumbled that everything but the "kitchen sink" was flung at him.

Mrs Clinton also worked like a Trojan. In Ohio, she held five grueling events across the state on Sunday before getting up at 4am on Monday after less than three hours' sleep to shake hands with workers in the dark as they clocked on at the Chrysler jeep factory in Toledo.

While her exhausted 70-strong press corps, including The Daily Telegraph, struggled to remain awake, Mrs Clinton drew on a deep reservoir of energy and sang froid.

Her rare chances to sleep came on her plane "Hill Force One".

On Wednesday, and Ohioans and Texans were voting, the aircraft hit turbulence so bad that food flew across the cabin and flight attendants were visibly alarmed.

Two young female television producers held hands, fearing they might die. But up at the front, Mrs Clinton, belted into her seat, slept though it all.

The New York senator's crowds were much smaller than Mr Obama's. But they were packed with the economically disadvantaged, particularly older women who were determined she would make history as the first female president and white men turned off by the rock-star aura surrounding Mr Obama.

These were the tip of a "silent majority" iceberg of voters. Most were at work and too busy to go to a political rally that might take four hours out of their daily struggle to put food on their table.

But they turned out for her in their droves. There was an air of almost sullen resentment at her rallies at the rise of Mr Obama.

In Westerville, Ohio, one woman carried a sign that read: "DON'T LET THE PRESS BOY CRUSH PICK OUR PRESIDENT".

Another placard declared: "Pretty Man...Pretty Words...Pretty INEXPERIENCED! VOTE HILLARY".

In Youngstown, Ohio, one of the most economically depressed towns in America, Mike Rakich, 65, a retired teacher, claimed that blacks were being racist because they wouldn't support a "white woman" and that Mr Obama might be assassinated if he were elected.

"He's good with words, he wants to be another JFK [John F. Kennedy]. But Kennedy ended up losing his life. There's a big possibility it could happen again. Hillary Clinton would be more secure. I don't think anybody would make an attempt on her life."

Within the Clinton campaign, which has been riven with dissention over who was been to blame for the once "inevitable" candidate being pitched into a battle for survival, there was fierce argument over whether she should "go negative" against Mr Obama.

The former First Lady decided that desperate times called for desperate measures.

The pollster Mark Penn, her much-maligned chief strategist, won the argument that she should project strength, competence and experience over those who countered that she should stress her human side.

But Mrs Clinton managed to pull off the trick of being both victim and aggressor. At a rally in Austin, she told supporters: "I have earned every wrinkle on my face." The plea to women was explicit.

The actress Mary Steenbergen prompted nods and laughs when she told a crowd in Beaumont, Texas that her long-time friend "does great girlfriend".

Clinton events were organised with Soviet-style efficiency. At a televised "Texas-sized town hall meeting" in Austin, some members of the crowd were instructed to shout the words "We love you Hillary" as laid down in typed directions from senior campaign staff.

Mr Penn, who has feuded with Mandy Grunwald, Mrs Clinton advertising chief, and Harold Ickes, brought in to beef up her operation after the Iowa defeat, was behind the "3am phone call" advertisement that made a crucial difference.

The ad, denounced by the Obama campaign as a scare tactic that was first used by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, depicted a phone ringing in the White House and asked who had the experience to deal with tough foreign policy crises.

Mr Obama, a humble state senator less than three years ago, is vulnerable to the charge of inexperience while Mrs Clinton, riding on the coat-tails of her husband, has successfully made the case that she is tried and tested on national security.

Late-deciding voters broke by more than two to one for Mrs Clinton, just as they had in New Hampshire.

In the final 48 hours, the media had been shamed into taking a harder line against Mr Obama after the satirical show "Saturday Night Live" had mocked the press corps for being compliant and fawning.

Suddenly, Mr Obama was being peppered with questions about Tony Rezko, a former associate who corruption trial began - with terrible timing for the Illinois senator - on Monday and his stance on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Confusion and obfuscation over contacts between a senior adviser and the Canadian government fuelled a feeling that Mr Obama had been engaging in empty rhetoric when he denounced the treaty blamed by Ohioans for 50,00 job losses.

Clinton apparatchiks branded Rezko Mr Obama's "patron and mentor" for more than a decade.

Mr Obama reacted badly to the newly hostile scrutiny, scuttling away from a cut-short press conference as angry questions were still being shouted.

Just as Mr Obama was being knocked off his pedestal, Mrs Clinton was revelling in the role of scrappy underdog, battling for survival just as ordinary Americans struggle in their everyday lives.

In Columbus, she dedicated her comeback to them. "For everybody who has ever been counted out and refused to be knocked out, for everyone who has stumbled and stood right back up and for everybody who works hard and never gives up," she roared. "This one's for you."

The Daily Telegraph, 2 March 2008

Hillary Clinton's dash for must-win states

Westerville , Ohio

Lagging in Texas polls and tied with her rival Barack Obama in Ohio, Hillary Clinton was engaged in a frantic dash across the two must-win states with just 48 hours to rescue her White House dream.

The former First Lady abandoned appeals for Americans to make history by electing their first female president, instead lambasting Mr Obama as a purveyor of empty rhetoric who was dangerously inexperienced in foreign policy.

At the same time, she sought to blunt her rival's star appeal by secretly flying to New York to appear on the "Saturday Night Live" television show, appearing alongside her impersonator - both dressed in matching brown trouser-suits - and gamely declaring: "This campaign is going very well - very, very well."

But the latest opinion polls showed Mrs Clinton trailing by four points in Texas and tied in Ohio. Mr Obama has won the last 11 primary contests and erased double-digit Clinton leads in the two big states where aides said just a fortnight ago that she would score massive victories.

Now, Clinton advisers are lashing out at the "unfair" election rules in Texas, slamming the media for giving Mr Obama an easy ride and insisting that it is the Illinois senator - with a clear delegate lead - who needs clear victories.

Among Clinton loyalists, there was palpable anger at the seemingly unstoppable rise of Mr Obama, who is attracting vastly bigger crowds. Debbie Winningham, 53, wielding a home-made sign that reading "Don't let the press boy crush pick our president", said at a rally in Westerville that sexism was playing a part.

"The press is enamoured with Obama. He's articulate and intelligent and you can't take that away from him but so is Hillary. He's young and he's not a woman. Powerful women have a hard time presenting their message without being criticised for it. Her experience seems to have gone against her."

Speaking on her campaign plane as it flew through the bright Texas skies, Mrs Clinton mocked Mr Obama as an empty vessel. "His entire campaign is based on one speech he made at an anti-war rally in 2002," she said. "I give him credit for making the speech but the speech was not followed up with action, which is part of a pattern we see repeatedly - a lot of talk and little action. As they say in Texas - all hat and no cattle."

Hours after appealing at an open-air rally in balmy Fort Worth, Texas - where she said a vote for Mr Obama would require a risky "leap of faith" - she was on a bus in Ohio driving past frozen ponds and mounds of snow. In Westerville, she attacked Mr Obama with sarcasm. "For some people, this election is about how you feel, it's about speeches. It's not for me — it's about solutions."

She said repeatedly that she was the only candidate who could "answer the phone at 3am" in the White House and respond effectively. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, could defeat Mr Obama because of the Vietnam veteran's national security experience, she suggested.

Mr Obama stuck resolutely to his message that change was needed and hit back that it was judgement and not experience that mattered. He returned again and again to Mrs Clinton's 2002 vote to authorise the Iraq war, a political millstone around her neck.

"Real change isn't voting for George Bush's war in Iraq and then telling the American people it was actually a vote for more diplomacy when you start running for president," he said in Rhode Island. "The title of the bill was 'A Resolution to Authorise the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq'. What else were you voting for? I knew what it was and that's why I opposed this war from the start."

His presence in Rhode Island, along with Vermont one of two small states that vote with Texas and Ohio on Tuesday, was a sign of his growing confidence. But he has thrown every possible resource into Texas, where Mrs Clinton is relying on Hispanic voters, and Ohio, where the former First Lady is counting on white males and older women, in an attempt to score a knockout blow.

Less than two hours after she appeared in Westerville, he arrived there for his own rally. Having eclipsed Mrs Clinton in fundraising, Mr Obama has been able to flood the airwaves with television and radio advertisements as well as to send a small army of paid staff to Texas and Ohio while his opponent has relied on volunteers.

Her voice rasping and her pleas for votes laced with desperation, Mrs Clinton admitted in Westerville that she was in overdrive. "You can tell I get a little worked up," she said. But she added: "You can count on me. I am not afraid to get into a fight on your behalf."

The Daily Telegraph, 16 February 2008

Hillary Clinton's last stand in Lone Star state

San Antonio

No one ever thought that the battle for the Democratic nomination could come down to Texas, but the Lone Star state, home of President George W Bush, is shaping up to be the site of Hillary Clinton's last stand.

Maybe it would have been a metaphor too far for the former First Lady to appear at the Alamo, as virtually every presidential candidate, from John F Kennedy to her husband Bill, had done before her. But at a rally at a university gym a few miles away, her situation was every bit as desperate as that of the band of Texans besieged there in 1836. Just as Colonel William Travis, the Alamo's commander, had done when surrounded by Mexican forces, Clinton was drawing a line in the sand. After eight victories in a row for her rival Barack Obama - with two more expected next week - she declared March 4, the day Texas votes, to be "Turning Point Day".

Clad in a canary-coloured pantsuit, the former First Lady did her best to become the Yellow Rose of Texas. Although the New York senator was born in Illinois, educated in New England and has spent most of her adult life in Arkansas and Washington, she seemed to be trying to transform herself into the belle of the Southern song about the love between a black man and a slave woman, who was "the sweetest rose of colour this darky ever knew".

She had, she told the 4,000 people at the rally, lived in San Antonio for three months in 1972 "to register voters, particularly Hispanic voters" while campaigning for George McGovern in his landslide defeat against Richard Nixon, "It's where I became addicted to Mexican food. You may have heard I eat a lot of hot peppers. They keep me healthy, they keep me going and they remind me of south Texas."

Clinton even went door to door in a Hispanic area of San Antonio, among the voting bloc whose support she will need to hold off Obama's surging campaign. However, at the five houses she called at she met at least one Obama supporter and several undecided voters. She told several people that she had canvassed there in 1972, but the local county commissioner accompanying her said she was mistaken: "It was a different neighbourhood."

At a stop earlier in the day at McAllen, six miles from the Mexican border, she had told the crowd: "I came away with such a deep feeling of connection and concern about this wonderful part of our country. I quickly fell in love with the strong character of Texans." A supporter at another rally hours later displayed a sign that declared: "Hillary - First Latina President."

In a curious echo of Rudy Giuliani's disastrous "late state" strategy, Clinton is trusting that Hispanics - who could constitute up to 40 per cent of the vote - will repay their debt to her by delivering a crushing victory. But in her struggle to win the Democratic nomination, the former front-runner is struggling to move past the denial phase. Many Clinton loyalists, who believed the nomination was hers by right, still view the man vying to become America's first black president as a vacuous upstart.

While Obama appeared in Wisconsin - which votes on Tuesday - Clinton appeared to concede that state by heading straight to Texas. In El Paso, she made no mention of the three heavy defeats she'd just suffered in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

The next morning, after grudgingly congratulating her rival, she remarked that "from my perspective, this is the exciting part of the campaign". When asked whether she had to win big in Texas, she responded sharply: "I don't think about it like that."

Besides denial, there is an element of Stockholm Syndrome about Clinton's campaign. She and her backers seem fixated on Obama, struggling to fathom his success while simultaneously mocking - or borrowing - his slogans. At her Texas events, U2's City of Blinding Lights - which has become Obama's anthem - was played before and after her speeches. In San Antonio, supporters chanted "Yes, we can", the Obama campaign's catchphrase. Having adopted "change" - Obama's watchword - after her Iowa defeat, Clinton has jettisoned it contemptuously in Texas.

"You know, change is going to happen anyway," she said in San Antonio. "Change happens whether we like it or not. The question is not whether we will have change. The question is whether we will have progress that makes a difference."

Clinton 's White House campaign, masterminded by her chief strategist Mark Penn, could come undone in Texas, where Obama only needs to hold her to a slender victory to make it mathematically impossible for her to overcome him. The Illinois senator leads by more than 100 pledged delegates, with more of her "superdelegates" from the party establishment - a previous firewall - defecting by the day. Penn has declared in a memo: "Change begins March 4."

Best known for identifying "microtrends", Penn oversaw Clinton's New York Senate race in 2000, in which every position she took was tested by polling, and therefore precisely in line with the views of groups he had calculated that she needed to win over.

The same approach was taken with her presidential run, even though such "triangulation" came much more naturally to her husband Bill than it did to Hillary, a strong liberal by conviction. Penn judged that this Clinton needed to be hawkish on foreign policy to defeat a Republican - hence her vote for the Iraq war.

Hispanics were viewed as likely to be blindly loyal to the Clintons. So Hillary - wanting to woo anti-immigration voters - voted for a wall between the United States and Mexico and came out against giving drivers' licences to illegal immigrants. Obama opposed both stances.

But now the senator from Illinois has begun to test that loyalty, particularly among those under 40, who appear to be rejecting the politics of racial identity. Ted Kennedy, who has led the charge in the Senate to secure immigration reform and is beloved by Latinos, is expected to be deployed in Texas to campaign for Obama.

On the day of her El Paso speech, Clinton had dismissed her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, an aide for 16 years and the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Having previously held up Doyle as an example of how much she valued Hispanics, Clinton faced a backlash.

In an email to a Hispanic leader entitled "Why do brown people get screwed first?", Mose Mercado, a prominent Hispanic activist and Obama supporter, wrote: "I think it is s--t that she is the one that got fired and blamed for all the problems. (They are supposedly ahead with Hispanics and women and so they fire the Hispanic woman?)"

At the San Antonio rally, David Marne, a local mayor, said that race would be central to the primary. "None of the candidates are saying it - they're avoiding the issue. But Hillary is attracting a lot of Hispanics who are more competitive economically with African-Americans, and there's a split there. You look around here and there's a handful of African-Americans. Go to an Obama rally and you'll see a handful of Hispanics."

Although blacks make up only about 12 per cent of the Texas population, the complicated electoral rules give them more weight because urban districts have been allocated more delegates due to high turnout rates. The most heavily Hispanic areas in the south of the state have had low turnout, and therefore get fewer delegates.

Texas has elected a woman governor before - Ann Richards in 1990 - but black politicians have also fared well. In the 1988 Democratic primary, Jesse Jackson, the last black man to make a serious tilt at the presidency, finished second to Michael Dukakis, the eventual nominee, and nearly matched him in delegate numbers.

Clinton is also relying heavily on the female vote. In Texas, where men are men and women have big hair, her decision not to leave her husband after he lied about his relationship with a young White House intern called Monica Lewinsky is a plus.

"Hillary's intelligent and she's experienced," said Henrietta Suzman, 69, in McAllen. "And she showed respect for Bill when he got in trouble with Monica. To me, there's two types of women - Princess Di and Hillary. Princess Diana said there's no room for three [in her marriage]. Hillary stood by her man."

Gloria Camarillo-Vasquez, 65, an Obama volunteer in San Antonio, said that Hispanic women were drawn to Clinton because they saw her as a victim, but noted that two of her most prominent Hispanic supporters, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles and Henry Cisneros, a former mayor of San Antonio, had publicly humiliated their wives with well-publicised affairs. "They feel sorry for her and a lot of them are going to come out for her because she was victimised by her husband. A lot of women are out there rooting for her because they're also victims of this kind of machismo."

Clinton also has the Texas party machine. "Hillary is someone we know, someone we're close to. I don't feel that with Obama. He's never been to Texas, I think," said Aurora Dela Garza, a Democratic official. In fact, Obama has visited the state - drawing a crowd of 20,000 in Austin a year ago and holding a sell-out event in San Antonio last June.

"Hillary came here for fundraising only," countered Judy Hall, a co-founder of "Alamobama", a San Antonio volunteer network. "They are using old models and staying within their comfort zone. It's a clique - they're not reaching out to the larger community." Obama's grassroots "ground game" has defeated Clinton's party establishment links across much of the country, and there are signs this could give him an advantage in Texas, too.

One opinion poll released yesterday gave Clinton a 16-point advantage in the Lone Star state while another put Obama six points ahead. But Obama, due to touch down in Texas on Tuesday, has consistently exceeded expectations, while the former First Lady has no margin for error.

The Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2008

Barack Obama gets specific on policy

Bangor , Maine

There was something different about Barack Obama's stump speech in Maine on the eve of last night's Democratic caucuses.

The inspirational rhetoric and talk of hope were there but he'd also taken a leaf out of Hillary Clinton's book by including a laundry list of policy proposals and a plug for his website to counter the oft-repeated charge that he's long on talk but short on specifics for action.

He talked of mortgage tax help for some home owners as he addressed a crowd of 5,700 crammed into a basketball arena in Bangor, Maine. Outside in the snow, another thousand more stood listening.

"We're going to have a $4,000 tuition credit for every student every year so that they are able to reduce the amount of money they're going to borrow for their college education," he went on and as he hit his familiar applause lines, the crowd whooped and stamped their feet as if at a sports game.

There were chants of "Yes we can" and cries of "You're right about that" and "I love you". But there were also periods of relative silence as Mr Obama outlined his proposals and how they would be paid for.

Mr Obama has never been short of policy stances. Last summer, when his candidacy appeared to be in the doldrums, he was criticised for being too long-winded and professorial when he engaged in esoteric discussions that sometimes took on the air of an academic seminar.

But one of the keys to his recent electoral success has been that he has fused his soaring calls for "ordinary people to do extraordinary things" and insistence that "there is no problem we cannot solve and no destiny we cannot fulfil" with the nuts and bolts.

The Illinois senator was also explicit about the criticism, levelled repeatedly by Mrs Clinton, that he lacks detail.

"There's the argument that he gives a speech but he hasn't been specific in terms of how he's going to solve some of these problems," he said in Bangor.

"Anybody who wants to know anything about anything, go to our website barackobama.com.

"Because there is not a single one of these problems, whether its climate change or health care, where we have not specified exactly how we're going to get that done, where we have not figured out how we're going to pay for it without adding to our budget deficit.

"So that is just a ruse, that is just folks trying to bamboozle you. Don't believe that."

Several in the crowd said afterwards that Mr Obama had spoken in more detail than they'd expected.

"He was much more specific today than when I saw him in September, " said Lacey Kellett, 67, a retired teacher.

"Back then he was just getting us revved up but now he's really, really serious.

"I hope so much he can do it. He's such a decent man and we need decency back in this country.

"He inspires me so much that I want to cry."

Michael Edwards, 57, who works in natural resources policy, had driven for more than three hours from the other side of the Canadian border to see Mr Obama.

"He's a model for the civilised world," Mr Edwards said. "I said to him: 'If you can inspire a cynic like me, you can inspire anyone'.

The Daily Telegraph, 9 February 2008

Barack Obama: Only I can win McCain fight

Omaha , Nebraska

John McCain's new status as near-certain Republican presidential candidate has been seized on by Barack Obama in his battle with Hillary Clinton to become the maverick senator's Democratic opponent.

Democrats know Mr McCain will be their foe in November, Mr Obama is arguing that only he can compete effectively against the former Vietnam prisoner of war, who has a track record of attracting centrists.

The Illinois senator hopes that "electability" will be the clinching argument when Washington state, Louisiana and Nebraska vote today (Sat) and in the four other states that vote on Sunday and Tuesday. Wins in these next seven states could give him crucial momentum as well as extra delegates.

A "Time" magazine poll published yesterday showed Mr Obama beating Mr McCain by six per cent in a projected presidential election, with Mrs Clinton tied with him at 46 per cent.

Obama advisers hope he could build a coalition similar to that attracted by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, who brought blue-collar "Reagan Democrats" into the party. Republicans supporting Mr Obama have already been dubbed "Obamacans".

Mr Obama told a crowd of some 10,000 in Omaha, Nebraska, a Republican "red" state in the American heartland, that he could "reach out across the aisle and try to find common ground" in November.

"That's why I am looking forward to debating John McCain because I know how to reach out to independents and I've got Republican support. And that's what we're going to need to win....I've shown I can build bridges. We've got to get a working majority for change."

Mr Obama has said there is a "whole dump truck" of dirt that Republicans, who had made a "cottage industry" out of being against Mrs Clinton, would try to unload on the former First Lady.

At the same time, he argued, Mrs Clinton is vulnerable to Mr McCain because of her 2002 vote to authorise the Iraq war and her support for categorising the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation.

"When I'm debating John McCain he won't be able to say I supported the war too because I didn't. He won't be able to say why have you given George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran because I haven't."

Although it has not yet been brought up directly, Mr McCain's age is likely to be a major general election issue and would be brought into much sharper focus against Mr Obama who, at 46, is 14 years younger than Mrs Clinton.

At 72 by the time he would be sworn in, Mr McCain would be the oldest president to take office. Mr Obama has already made a subtle jab at this by hailing him for his "half a century of service to this country" befor quickly adding that he could not be "not the person who is going to lead this country in a new direction".

Mr Obama is heavily favoured in Nebraska and was welcomed to "Obamaha" by Ben Nelson, one of the state's two senators, for the Thursday rally. Mr Nelson is one of a string of "red" states elected officials who have backed Mr Obama, in part because of his strength beyond his party base.

On Super Tuesday this week, Mr Obama's 13 wins in the 22 states voting included a several Republican "red" states such as Idaho, North Dakota and Utah and the key swing state of Missouri.

Opinion polls show Mrs Clinton is a polarising figure who has limited appeal among independents and Republicans, though she currently has stronger support among core Democratic constituencies such as blue-collar white males and older women.

She has portrayed herself as battle-tested in the partisan wars of the 1990s and therefore a much tougher opponent against a Republican but this pitch is complicated by her collegial relationship with Mr McCain.

The two senators are said to have bonded over vodka shots during a congressional trip to Estonia in 2004.

When asked recently about a contest between his wife and Mr McCain, President Bill Clinton said: "They always laughed that if they wound up being the nominees of their party, it would be the most civilised election in American history."

Mr McCain has been a crusader against the influence of money in politics while Mrs Clinton has come under fire for accepting campaign donations from federal lobbyists.

""I will be in a stronger position to have a discussion on how we will reform Washington against John McCain given that I don't take PAC [Policial Action Committee] money, I don't take federal lobbyist money, I've been a champion on some of these issues." Mr Obama told reporters on his plane en route to Nebraska.

"I think Senator Clinton would have a harder time making some of those arguments."

The Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2008

Barack Obama feels the Super Tuesday force

Chicago

Super Tuesday was long seen by Hillary Clinton as the moment she would be crowned as Democratic presidential nominee after being embraced months earlier as the party Establishment’s choice and the inevitable victor.

Instead, she now finds herself locked in a bitter tussle with a Young Pretender called Barack Obama, 14 years her junior, that will certainly last into March, very possibly into April and could still be undecided by the time of the Democratic convention in Denver in August.

Super Tuesday, improbably, was a draw. A national primary with 24 states voting, Democrats voting in 22 of them ended with 13 going to Mr Obama, eight going to Mrs Clinton and the former First Lady edging the popular vote by a single percentage point. In terms of delegates, Mrs Clinton claimed more than her rival.

"What was once inevitable is no longer inevitable," said David Axelrod, Mr Obama's chief strategist. "What was once a lop-sided race is no longer lop-sided. The momentum has shifted."

Significantly, exit polls showed Mr Obama gaining ground among white males - winning them by 49 to 44 percent while Mrs Clinton once again relied on older women and Hispanics. The former First Lady won white women by a 20-point margin.

Mr Obama needs to broaden his appeal among women but his progress with white men will encourage his advisers who note that Mrs Clinton, while maintaining her bedrock support, is not expanding her voter base.

So-called "black-brown" racial divisions continued, with Mr Obama winning 82 per cent of blacks and Mrs Clinton winning 61 per cent of Hispanics.

But Mr Obama did well among Hispanics in Arizona and was locked in a tight contest last night in New Mexico, the state with the biggest Hispanic vote.

The economy remained the top issue for Democratic voters, which plays to Mrs Clinton's strengths. But "change" - Mr Obama's slogan, since adopted by every other presidential candidate - was ranked by voters as twice as important as "experience", Mrs Clinton's watchword.

With 2,025 delegates needed to win the nomination, neither Mrs Clinton nor Mr Obama had achieved even half of that number even though well over half the 50 US states have now voted.

Setting aside "super delegates", party bigwigs who currently favour Mrs Clinton but will probably swing behind whoever the voters back, her overall lead was about two dozen delegates.

As soon as it was clear the two senators had shared the spoils, both campaigns went into overdrive to spin the night as victory. Certainly, Mrs Clinton appeared to have blunted some of Mr Obama's momentum which built after he trounced her by 28 points in South Carolina and was then endorsed by the Kennedy clan amid a backlash against former President Bill Clinton for playing the race card. There were soaring expectations within the Obama campaign when one opinion poll gave him a 13-point lead in California, where victory would have all but ended Mrs Clinton's White House ambitions. But Mrs Clinton eventually won by 10 points.

She also overcame Mr Obama in Massachusetts, where help from the Kennedys was not enough, New York (though not by as big a margin as Mr Obama won in his home state of Illinois) and Oklahoma.

Her clear edge among Hispanics gave her not only California but also Arizona and possibly New Mexico as well as helping her to victory in New Jersey.

She also won Tennessee. But the list of states won by Mr Obama, while not quite equalling Mrs Clinton's delegate haul, was sensational for a 46-year-old first-term senator up against the early front runner whose allies had done their best to marginalise him as "the black candidate". In the space of two weeks, her 20-point national opinion poll lead has been erased.

As well as winning the Southern states of Georgia and Alabama, he took Connecticut, barely 25 miles from Mrs Clinton's home, Minnesota, Missouri, Colorado and Delaware, all overwhelmingly white states.

He also picked off far more Republican voting "red" states than Mrs Clinton, bolstering his argument that he is more electable against John McCain in November. Idaho, North Dakota, Kansas, Utah and Alaska are all conservative states where Mr Obama won partly by attracting independents and centrists.

The counter argument from Clinton strategists was that Democrats are highly unlikely to win these states in the November general election, making the former First Lady's showing in more Democratic states much more significant.

Having raised a million dollars a day last month, twice the cash Mrs Clinton brought in, Mr Obama has the resources at hand to advertise heavily and organise in the remaining states.

The calendar for the next two weeks heavily favours Mr Obama.

On Saturday, Nebraska, Washington state and Louisiana, where he heads today, go to the polls. The next day Maine votes