Obama’s on a roll

Sen. Barack Obama won his ninth and 10th consecutive victories this week, handily defeating Hillary Clinton in the Wisconsin primary and in Hawaii’s caucus. Obama’s blowout win in his native Hawaii was expected, but his 17-point landslide in Wisconsin surprised most analysts. He cut deeply into Clinton’s traditional bases of support there, capturing 50 percent of both married women and union members. In Wisconsin’s Republican primary, John McCain won easily over Mike Huckabee, moving another step closer to capturing the nomination.

Both Clinton and Obama immediately turned their attention to the crucial March 4 primaries in Texas and Ohio, where Clinton must win by double-digit margins to overtake Obama’s lead in the race to amass the 2,025 delegates needed for the nomination. Clinton stepped up her message that Obama was not ready for either Republican attacks or the presidency. “Only one of us faced serious opposition in the past,” she told a campaign rally in Ohio. “Only one of us is ready to be commander in chief in a dangerous world.” She and Obama also intensified their courtship of the party’s “superdelegates”—the 796 party leaders and officeholders who aren’t pledged to any candidate, and who could put either one over the top.

“The Democratic nomination is now Barack Obama’s to lose,” said Ron Fournier in the Associated Press. His Wisconsin triumph shows that Clinton’s once-imposing lead among women and white, working-class men is eroding fast. For Hillary, “it’s panic-button time.” The only thing that can stop Obama now is a major gaffe.

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The results from Wisconsin are “powerful evidence of a national shift in mass opinion among Democrats,” said Steve Kornacki in The New York Observer. Clinton’s core supporters—Hispanics, middle-aged women, and blue-collar voters—are defecting to Obama, imperiling her advantage in Texas and Ohio. That startling trend “essentially guarantees that she will not pick up any more superdelegate endorsements in the next two weeks.” No Democratic official will back a campaign “that seems to be losing the confidence of the party’s rank and file.”

Clinton, though, is fully entitled to do her best to sway the superdelegates, said the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in an editorial. Obama supporters are making noises about “nomination ‘theft,’” but it wasn’t Clinton who invented the superdelegates. The Democratic Party did, decades ago, to prevent deadlocked conventions. Still, the superdelegates would best serve their party by withholding any commitments until “the primary season plays out,” and seeing which candidate emerges with the lead in regular delegates.