It’s a reality many rank and file Democratic Party voters are not happy about. In the early ’80s the party created the Superdelegate system to try to keep the party mainstream by giving party insiders votes as so-called ’superdelegates.’ The vast majority of superdelegates are members of Congress or the Democratic National Committee.

In Sacramento, long-time party activist and Democratic National Committee member Steven Ybarra is still undecided and waiting, he says, to see what candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are willing to do for Latinos. He says he’s been hearing a lot from both campaigns to try to woo his vote. “‘We need for you to commit, and to vote and to, rah, rah, rah, sis boom bah.’ OK, what’s in it for Latinos nationwide? What’s in it for Latinos here in California? That’s what I want to know,” Ybarra said.

To some ordinary Democrats, the superdelegate system smacks of political insiders getting too much influence. They worry that superdelegates could decide the nominee if the race stays close. “I’ve never voted for them, but I know that they can make a choice that could interfere with whatever I vote,” said West Sacramento voter Dave Demianew.

California Democratic Party vice-chair and superdelegate Alexandra Gallardo-Rooker committed her vote to Obama about eight months ago and says her vote will stay the same even though Hillary Clinton won the state’s primary election. She says superdelegates are not intended to thwart the will of voters — in fact, just the opposite. “And I think the grass roots are speaking louder and louder all the time, and the voters and I think … we’ll do the will of the people at the end of the day,” she said.

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(CNN) — Sen. Hillary Clinton on Thursday sharpened her attacks on Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama as she faces what even her supporters admit are must-win situations in Texas and Ohio in the weeks ahead.

At a campaign stop at a General Motors Corp. plant in Lordstown, Ohio, the senator from New York accused Obama of caving in to special interests.

“My opponent says that he’ll take on the special interests,” she said. “Well, he told people he stood up to the nuclear industry and passed a bill against them. But he actually let the nuclear industry water down his bill — the bill never actually passed.”

Clinton was referring to a 2006 bill that Obama drafted after an Illinois nuclear power plant was found to have released radiation into surrounding groundwater.

Obama’s original bill would have required power plants to notify the public and government officials when any radiation was released, but subsequent versions had less stringent reporting requirements, The New York Times reported. The bill was never voted on by the full Senate.

Clinton also accused Obama of supporting “billions of dollars of breaks for the oil industry” by voting for an energy bill she opposed and said he did not support the workers of a Maytag Corp. plant that closed in his home state of Illinois.

Reacting to Clinton’s charges, Obama spokesman Bill Burton said his candidate “doesn’t need any lectures on special interests from the candidate who’s taken more money from Washington lobbyists than any Republican running for president.”

“Sen. Clinton may have said that attacks and distortions are the ‘fun’ and ‘exciting’ part of the campaign, but they’re exactly what everyone else in America is tired of,” Burton said.

In recent days, Clinton has challenged Obama’s ability to deliver on his rhetoric.

“There’s a big difference between us — speeches versus solutions, talk versus action,” she said.

“Speeches don’t put food on the table. Speeches don’t fill up your tank or fill your prescription or do anything about that stack of bills that keeps you up at night.”

Her remarks in Ohio echo statements she made a day earlier in McAllen, Texas, when she said, “I am in the solutions business. My opponent is in the promises business.”

Clinton was set later Thursday to hold events in Dayton and Columbus, Ohio. Obama was to be in his hometown of Chicago, Illinois, and had no public events scheduled.

CNN contributor and Clinton supporter James Carville said the senator must do well in the March 4 Ohio and Texas primaries if she is to stop Obama’s momentum.

Carville said he thought Clinton could still win the nomination.

“You know, this thing is close. Not all the Democrats have been heard from. … If anybody can do this, I think she can,” said Carville, a major force behind President Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign.

Clinton’s aggressive stance may be in reaction to Obama’s momentum after he won eight contests in a row — including victories by wide margins in Tuesday’s primaries in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

In those contests, Obama also outpolled Clinton among demographic groups she had carrried earlier — women, lower-income voters and Latinos. Clinton is banking on those groups to carry her to victory in Texas and Ohio.

The wins in the Potomac primaries gave Obama a lead over Clinton in the delegate count for the first time — 1,253 to 1,211, according to CNN calculations.

“In my neighborhood, you know, you had to win games if you wanted to brag,” said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist and Obama supporter. “And I think right now, Barack Obama is ahead in delegates. He’s ahead in states. He’s ahead in the popular vote. He’s winning.

“Sen. Clinton has got to win some of these contests, you know, to get to the finals.”

Neither Clinton nor Obama is likely to pick up the 2,025 delegates needed to win the nomination outright before the primary season ends in June, mainly because Democrats divvy up each state’s delegates in proportion to the candidates’ share of the popular vote. 

The Democratic nomination likely will be decided by the roughly 800 superdelegates, which include party officers, elected officials and activists.

Obama’s camp argues the superdelegates should support the candidate with the most popular support, as indicated by a majority of pledged delegates going into the convention.

Clinton’s campaign, on the other hand, says the superdelegates should support the candidate they think will be the best nominee in the general election as well as the best president.

MoveOn.org, an influential liberal activist group, on Thursday said it would launch a petition drive calling on the superdelegates not to go against the popular vote.

“The worst thing for the party and democracy is if all these new voters feel like the nomination was brokered in a backroom somewhere. The superdelegates have got to let the voters decide,” MoveOn.org Executive Director Eli Pariser said in a statement.

MoveOn.org has endorsed Obama.

In a possible indication that Clinton is going to fight for every delegate, her camp on Thursday announced that daughter Chelsea Clinton would be dispatched to Hawaii to campaign before the state’s primary Tuesday.

However, Chelsea Clinton may face an uphill battle there since Hawaii is Obama’s native state.

Bill Clinton on Thursday was scheduled to campaign in Wisconsin, which also holds its primary Tuesday.

Recent polls in that state have shown a tight race between the two Democrats. A Strategic Vision survey conducted February 8 through Sunday finds Obama ahead of Clinton 45 percent to 41 percent, a lead outside the poll’s margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Carville said Clinton could recover from a loss in Wisconsin.

“It certainly would be preferable for her to win Wisconsin, but I don’t put it in the same category as I would put Texas and Ohio on March 4,” he said.

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — Senator Hillary Clinton won Florida’s Democratic presidential primary, according to network and Associated Press projections, in a contest that was largely a popularity poll because no convention delegates were at stake.

Clinton had 48 percent of the vote to 30 percent for Illinois Senator Barack Obama, with 19 percent of precincts reporting. Former North Carolina Senator John Edwards had 14 percent.

Florida violated party rules when it moved its voting contest ahead of Feb. 5, the date sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee. The DNC allowed four early contests: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

While Obama, Edwards and Clinton agreed last September that they wouldn’t compete for Florida because of the party- imposed penalty, Clinton, a New York senator, last week announced she would press to have Florida’s delegates seated at the Democratic convention in August. Florida is a crucial swing state in the general election.

None of the candidates campaigned in the state, though Obama aired television commercials that ran on cable channels. Clinton attended fund-raisers there and held a rally with supporters tonight in Davie, Florida, after the polls closed.

“I am thrilled to have had this vote of confidence that you have given me today,” Clinton said. “I promise you I will do everything I can to make sure not only are Florida’s Democratic delegates seated, but Florida is in the winning column for the Democrats in 2008.”

Florida’s primary is a “beauty contest,” Obama told reporters on his plane to Kansas today. “None of us campaigned there, so people have no idea what the respective candidates stand for and haven’t had a chance to lift the hood and kick the tires.”

Still, tonight represents a “meaningful and decisive public opinion poll,” said Casey Klofstad, assistant professor of political science at the University of Miami.

“It presents an opportunity for Obama to continue his ascendancy or Clinton to put the brakes on that and regain some of the momentum she had before South Carolina,” Klofstad said.

By Brian Montopoli

If the polls are to be believed, Barack Obama, a man with just three years of Senate experience and virtually no national name recognition before the 2004 Democratic convention, is about to win the New Hampshire primary. The win would come less than a week after his victory in the Iowa caucuses and make him the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile - named most admired woman in the world, the spouse of a former president, the person the media had long talked about as the inevitable Democratic nominee - could be on the verge of a demoralizing defeat, one that wouldn’t be easy for her campaign to recover from. As her need to fight back tears in New Hampshire yesterday illustrated, the pressure of campaigning and expectations seem to be taking a toll on her.

So what happened? How did Obama’s campaign outmaneuver a Clinton team that many observers thought unstoppable?

Message:

Obama cast himself as the “change” candidate early in the campaign, and his competitors’ attempts to co-opt that message serve as a testament to its effectiveness. Clinton, realizing that an argument built on experience and competence had not won voters over, recast herself as the candidate whose experience could best bring change about. John Edwards, pushing populist rhetoric further than his rivals, cast himself as the only man willing to go far enough to affect real change. Even Mitt Romney, a Republican, has made the notion that he is a change candidate one of the central arguments of his campaign.

The candidates have good reason to cast themselves as change agents: Polls show that the majority of Americans - and the vast majority of Democrats - are now calling for it. More than half of Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa said the capacity for change was the most important factor in their assessment of a candidate. But change was not a Clinton campaign theme early in her campaign, which left the door open for Obama to claim it. He stressed that he opposed the war in Iraq, which Clinton voted for, to hammer home his rejection of Bush administration politics. While Clinton has repeatedly stressed her ability to foster change in Washington in recent weeks - she has been saying “if you want to know what kind of changes I will make, look at the changes I have already made” - one Democratic consultant calls the attempt “too little, too late, and too obvious.”

Tactics:

The Clinton campaign flirted with the notion of not competing in Iowa, a suggestion that doesn’t look so bad in retrospect. The former first lady finished third in the caucuses, a result that came in part because the Obama campaign, unlike the Clinton campaign, aggressively targeted new voters - and they responded. “The astounding thing that really made the difference is the massive increase in turnout,” says Dennis J. Goldford, professor of politics at Drake University. More than 239,000 Democrats caucused on Jan. 3rd, nearly double the number who did so in 2004. Fifty-seven percent of voters under 30 - a group that caucused in unprecedented numbers - broke for Obama.

The Clinton campaign has tried to downplay the importance of Obama’s victory in Iowa. “The worst thing would be to over count Iowa and its importance,” Chief Clinton Strategist Mark Penn told reporters after the caucuses. He added, “Iowa doesn’t have a record of picking presidents.” But the Clinton campaign seems to have underestimated how damaging a relatively poor finish in Iowa could be, particularly considering the compressed primary schedule and the media’s obsessive focus on the caucuses. Iowa isn’t always a bellwether - George H.W. Bush came in third there in 1988, behind Bob Dole and Pat Robertson, and went on to win the Republican nomination - but it can transform a campaign and anoint a new frontrunner. That’s exactly what happened in 2004, when John Kerry’s Iowa win propelled him to the Democratic nomination ahead of Howard Dean.

In many ways Obama did not run a traditional campaign targeted at solidifying the base of the party, instead opting to stress inclusiveness and speak of reaching out. But he ran a very traditional campaign in one sense: He put together a massive organization and raising over $100 million during 2007. Most candidates with insurgent-like energy shun the party establishment, but Obama has welcomed such support whenever offered, winning the endorsements of politicians and celebrities alike.

Clinton Fatigue:

After more than a decade in which the Clinton and Bush families have been at the forefront of politics, there was an opening for a candidate who could transform anti-Clinton (and, more broadly, anti-status quo) sentiment into support. “The Clintons and the Bushes represent the last generation for many people,” says David King, a public policy lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Obama has been able to claim the anti-Clinton mantle in part by resisting overtly negative attacks on his rivals, attacks that might have caused voters to see him as nothing more than the latest divisive politician to emerge onto the national scene. Most candidates, King says, will talk about a new, post-partisan era, but “the next talking point will be a little zinger to somebody else. Obama hasn’t been like that. He’s been consistently positive.”

And Clinton’s early message of competence may only have exacerbated Clinton fatigue in voters. “When she talked about the grounds for her claims of competence it kept tying her back to the 90s,” says Goldford. “And it raised questions in people’s minds - are we really talking about Bill’s third term?”

Background and Style:

People have long raised questions about whether Americans could elect a black president, but thus far Obama’s race seems to have benefited him. “His being black is an advantage in Democratic primaries because racial tolerance is an important component of being a liberal Democrat,” says Democratic media strategist Dan Payne. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman argues that Obama’s race “helps to make his cause a movement.”

“It helps people to believe they’re involved in a historically transformative experience,” Mellman says.

Obama’s compelling life story, which he has articulated both on the stump and in books, seems to evoke a strong emotional response in many voters. Like President George W. Bush, he talks eloquently about his struggles early in life. (The similarities don’t end there: When Mr. Bush was a candidate, he cast himself as the man who would unify the country, much like Obama does today.)

And Obama’s appealing personal style, combined with his generally positive rhetoric, has been enough for many.

“We don’t know much about him,” says Payne. “He’s almost like a spirit. People like the feeling they get when they’re in his presence. But they couldn’t tell you three things that he’s done or stands for. We’re at that weird stage where candidates get so magnetic that it almost doesn’t matter what they say.”

That doesn’t last forever, of course, and Obama could slip up anytime, perhaps making the kind of verbal gaffe that can sink a nominee. But it’s been a remarkable run so far, with Obama, not Clinton, emerging as the candidate most adept at avoiding the potential pitfalls of the presidential campaign.

“So far,” says King, “Barack Obama has done just about everything right.”

By John Whitesides

DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee capped come-from-behind campaigns with Iowa victories on Thursday to win the first contests of the U.S. presidential nominating race, U.S. media reported.

The two one-time underdogs defeated candidates who had for months been leading in the polls with Obama beating Hillary Clinton and Huckabee knocking off Mitt Romney in the fight to be the presidential candidates in the November election.

Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister, beat Romney fairly easily despite being dramatically outspent by the wealthy former Massachusetts governor and venture capitalist.

Obama, an Illinois senator, surged late in his three-way battle with Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady, and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Second place was still too close to call.

Iowa voters filled gathering spots in more than 1,700 precincts around the state to declare a presidential preference in Iowa’s caucuses, which open the state-by-state battle to choose candidates in the November 4 election to succeed President George W. Bush.

Huckabee’s upset reshaped a Republican race where no candidate has been able to claim front-runner status.

Iowa, where a sizable bloc of religious conservatives had fueled Huckabee’s rapid rise, represented perhaps the best chance for the former Arkansas governor to break through with a win and reshape the Republican presidential race.

His rise has been fueled by evangelical and religious conservatives who constitute a sizable bloc in Iowa.

He will face tougher going in the next contest on Tuesday in New Hampshire, where there are fewer evangelicals, and he has lingered well behind Romney and Arizona Sen. John McCain in polls.

The loss for Clinton, who a few months ago was considered in some quarters the almost certain Democratic nominee, put immense pressure on her to turn around her campaign in New Hampshire.

The 2008 campaign is the most open presidential race in more than 50 years, with no sitting president or vice president seeking their party’s nomination.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — It’s looking like it could be a happy New Year for Barack Obama: The Illinois senator is leading closest rival Hillary Clinton in a new poll with just one day to go before the critical Iowa caucuses.

In the final Des Moines Register poll before Thursday night’s nominating contests, Obama was the choice of 32% of likely Democratic caucus-goers. Sen. Clinton of New York, meanwhile, pulled 25% while former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards garnered 24%.

On the Republican side, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is leading ex-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in the new poll. Huckabee had 32% of likely caucus-goers while Romney is winning 26%. Arizona Sen. John McCain comes in third with 13%.

Judging from recent polls, Iowa has basically been a three-way race among Clinton, Obama and Edwards in the run-up to the first-in-the-nation caucuses, and Romney and Huckabee have traded places in the lead on the GOP side.

Meanwhile, about a third of likely caucus-goers said they could choose another candidate before Thursday night’s contests, according to the Register’s poll. Also, 6% said they were undecided or uncommitted.

Both the Republican and Democratic polls have margins of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.