For the first time since mid-February, Barack Obama closed strongly in heavily contested primaries Tuesday and out-distanced Hillary Clinton in ways that defied expectations.

Obama’s camp felt internally that it would finish well in Indiana and North Carolina and the evidence suggests it did.

Obama’s pre-primary polling average in North Carolina showed an 8-point average lead for Obama. It appears he out-performed that average by a full 4 points.

Similarly, in Indiana Obama trailed Clinton on average by roughly 6 points. It appears he will outperform that average by 4 or 5 points.

This is not an outcome either campaign expected.

Obama’s campaign did not expect to win Indiana or fight Clinton to something close to a tie. The Obama camp also internally wondered if the outcome in North Carolina could be a low single-digit win or a margin of, at most, 10 points.

In both categories, Obama bested his own expectations.

This matters in the larger context of how the party will view Obama’s overall electability.

By outperforming his polling average in both states, Obama can credibly argue his out-organized Clinton and his overall message resonated even as he spent, in the words of  campaign manager David Plouffe, “two weeks on the griddle.”

One of the key questions is whether Obama won the “day of” primary, meaning that he carried the votes cast on Election Day. It’s clear Obama crushed Clinton in early votes cast in both states. A good portion of these votes where cast before the controversy over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright took hold a second time in the campaign and before Clinton engaged Obama in a debate over her proposal for a federal gasoline tax holiday.

This was a key difference in the Clinton and Obama strategies heading into these primaries. Obama’s camp worked overtime to solicit support in early voting. Clinton made virtually no effort on this front as her campaign, by necessity, focused resources solely on Pennsylvania to ensure the biggest victory possible.

This strategic difference was fueled in part by the monetary advantage Obama’s long-enjoyed in recent months.

That advantage did not translate into Obama over-performing his polling average in Texas, Ohio or Pennsylvania. It appears it very much did in Indiana and North Carolina and may bring Obama closer than ever before to closing down the long-running contest for the Democratic nomination.

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The Clinton campaign is strategizing ways to persuade undecided superdelegates to back the former first lady for the Democratic presidential nomination and is laying the ground work for a public campaign to woo them to her side.

Clinton Campaign Chairman Terry McAuliffe denied any public effort to lobby undecided superdelegates is currently contemplated. But numerous sources inside the campaign and sympathetic to it told FOX News that a battle plan is being put together to use any and all possible resources to lobby superdelegates.

Among the ideas under regular discussion is to carry out public rallies, use direct mail and television spots in order to generate broader public support for undecided superdelegates to side with Clinton.

Part of the argument the Clinton campaign will use in this and every other outreach to superdelegates will be that the race is very close in terms of delegates and popular votes.

Clinton touched on this theme Tuesday night, citing the closeness of the race and the “he wins one, she wins one” nature of the campaign.

The other big selling point, also hit by Clinton tonight, is “to count all the votes.”

This is a reference to Michigan and Florida, which Clinton said shouldn’t be left out of delegate calculations, as they are now due to Democratic National Committee sanctions. Clinton said the nominee shouldn’t be chosen “by 48 states.”

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With the Clinton campaign in Scranton, Pa.

UPDATE:

Shortly after this post went up, Barack Obama told listeners to KDKA radio in Pittsburgh that he is not  “predicting a victory” in Pennsylvania. There is no correlation to this post and that Obama pronouncement.

Also, the Clinton campaign, through chief strategist Geoff Garin and communications director Howard Wolfson, “categorically deny” a Drudge post that internal campaign polls show Clinton leading by 11. However, Wolfson also says Clinton expects to “narrow the popular vote considerably” after the Pennsylvnia primary — this a reference to Obama’s lead in the popular vote through all nominating contests. It does not appear possible for Clinton to achieve Wolfson’s narrow considerably standard without a double-digit victory.

Most importantly, the post below says the last competitive presidental primary in Pennsylvania occurred in 1976. THIS IS WRONG. Democrat and Bourbon Room devotee Mary Anne Marsh reminds me that the 1980 nomination battle between Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and then-President Jimmy Carter went down to the wire in Pennsylvania, with Kennedy winning a narrow victory that was not sealed until two days later following a recount of votes in Montgomery County in suburban Philadelphia. The Philly suburbs were important then and they’re important now. THAT much The Bourbon Room got right.

Can a candidate win a presidential primary after never polling above 45 percent?

In theory, it’s possible. But it’s not very damn likely.

This is Barack Obama’s problem in Pennsylvania. And the Obama camp knows it. It will not predict victory because it knows that’s not possible. Obama’s goal is to minimize the magnitude of Clinton’s victory and fight tenaciously to win the perceptions/expectations war. Adjectives used to describe a 6-point Clinton victory (narrow, unimpressive, underwhelming) and a 12-point victory for Clinton (decisive, impressive, sizable) will in large measure dictate the way Super Delegates and contributors view Tuesday’s result.

The polling data suggests the race is close. But the polls, it seems, have a flaw almost identical to the polls in Ohio. Those polls pretty accurately predicted Obama’s support but under-counted Clinton’s.

The average of the ten polls in Ohio before Super Tuesday Part Two showed Clinton at 50.3 and Obama’s at 43.4. Clinton won the primary 54 to 44.

Here in Pennsylvania, Clinton’s average in the 10 most recent polls is 48.8 and Obama’s is 42.5. If Clinton out-performs the polls here as she did in Ohio and Obama hits his poll mark, Tuesday’s results will be 53 percent to 43 percent.

Is a 10-point victory enough for Clinton? It’s not enough to close the pledged delegate gap by very much. The Obama worst-case scenario is for Clinton to pick up 20 pledged delegates in a blowout well above 10 points for Clinton. But team Obama is betting on a Clinton pickup of 10 or fewer pledged delegates, in part because they expect to roll up big margins of victory in Philadelphia’s urban congressional districts.

So much of Tuesday’s results will be dictated by the ground war in the City of Brotherly Love and the surrounding suburbs. Seven of Pennsylvania’s 19 congressional districts are in Philadelphia or within 60 miles. Obama’s team hopes to win the African-American vote in Philadelphia by a margin of 90 percent to 10 percent (and believe urban backlash to the ABC debate last Wednesday helps enormously).

Obama is also looking for solid support in the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia, which is why Obama hopped aboard a train and gave speeches at and slow-rolled through numerous commuter train stops in the Philly suburbs.

But Obama must out-work and out-muscle the combined forces of Gov. Ed Rendell, a former mayor of Philadelphia, and the city’s current mayor, Michael Nutter. In the most important, vote-rich part of the state, Clinton has powerful allies who know where the votes are, how to mobilize them and how to motivate them.

The key question: how much political capital will Rendell and Nutter spend in Philadelphia when they know the social movement behind Obama is so strong there. Obama has mentioned at every stop since Friday the crowd of 35,000 he drew Friday night in Philadelphia. The message is clear to Rendell and Nutter — push against the tide of support at your own risk because these constituents and their long memories will be around after the presidential parade leaves Pennsylvania.

There’s one other factor to keep an eye on: who won the new registrant wars. About 165,000 new Democratic voters have registered for this primary since January. The Obama campaign says it has conducted a quietly effective registration drive in Philadelphia and intend to spring tens of thousands of new voters on Clinton.

This is a potential problem for Clinton. As her campaign readily acknowledges, turnout models in Pennsylvania are unreliable. The state hasn’t had a truly competitive Democratic presidential primary since 1976. Again, this is where Rendell and Nutter come in. If anyone in Pennsylvania knows who these new voters are and how to reach them in southeastern Pennsylvania, it is these two. The Clinton team would be far more worried about the X-factor of newly registered Democrats if they didn’t have Rendell and Nutter on their side.

One last point about Pennsylvania. Obama’s worked much harder here than he did in Ohio. Person-to-person contact and the Obama aura are still his best assets on the trail and he’s put them to exhaustive use in the closing hours, even coming up here to Scranton last night just to rattle Clinton’s cage in what’s supposed to be — and probably will be — Clinton country to the tune of 75 percent to 25 percent.

Corey O’Brien, a county commissioner in Lackawanna County, told me Obama made the trip to Scranton to prove he was ceding nothing to Clinton and to eat into Clinton’s base. O’Brien said if Obama can move Clinton down to the mid-60s in the Scranton area that will make his margins in the Philly area all the more important. Tactics like this were non-existent for Obama in Ohio and could make the difference between a 10-point or 12-point loss and a 6-point or 8-point loss.

And it is between these numbers, that Super Delegates, contributors and the news media will decide what happened in Pennsylvania, what it says about Obama’s general election prospects and if Clinton has earned her right to credibly continue her bid for the nomination

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Mark Penn, chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, quit Sunday.

The official reason: his meeting last Monday with the Colombian ambassador in Washington to discuss strategy to pass the U.S.-Colombia free trade pact that Sen. Clinton vehemently opposes.

Why was Penn meeting with the Colombians?

Because he’s always had another job as chief executive of Burson Marsteller Worldwide. Burson, you see, has a lucrative contract with the Colombian government to win congressional passage of the bilateral trade deal. Penn met with the Colombian government within hours of a Clinton speech to the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO in which she pledged to fight the trade deal in part because the Colombian government beats and intimidates union organizers.

Having your chief strategist plot strategy to pass a trade deal you oppose for reasons of economic and bedrock politics is, how should we say, awkward.

Penn bargained successfully for his job Friday, when the story first broke in The Wall Street Journal. He sent around apologetic e-mails to senior staff and apologized to Clinton by phone. The typically air-tight Clinton campaign was authorized to speak on background that Clinton and her senior staff were furious at Penn — a clear sign his days might be numbered.

Pressure built over the weekend as members of Congress with strong union ties and top union officials demanded swift action against Penn. Friends of Clinton had long disagreed with Penn’s strategy. Specifically, they questioned whether his obsessive tendency to slice and dice the electorate into microscopic sub-groups suitable for micro-targeted appeals was sufficient to compete against a full-fledged social movement in Barack Obama.

Those tensions had boiled under the surface for months and Clinton’s top delegate hunter, Harold Ickes, and her top ad consultant, Mandy Grunwald, had long been gunning for Penn. “Harold and Mandy must be very happy tonight,” a top Democratic source on Capitol Hill told The Bourbon Room on Sunday.

But Penn retained the unflinching loyalty of former President Bill Clinton, for whom he polled and offered strategic advice after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. Hillary also favored Penn for his work on her first and second campaigns for the U.S. Senate.

So why dump Penn this close to Pennsylvania where so much — dare I say everything — rides on a Clinton victory?

The campaign won’t say anything more than the meeting with the Colombian government was viewed as an unpardonable act of poor judgment (it won’t say betrayal but other Democrats not affiliated with the campaign do). The deeper reason, according to several top Democrats close to the Clinton camp, is that Penn’s continuation with the campaign threatened to disrupt the flow of money and the status of Super Delegates already committed to Hillary or those with whom she is actively negotiating support.

Clinton can’t afford a slow-down in fundraising. She needs every penny she can raise for the primary and her ability in February and March to solicit funds for the general election may make for decent fundraising headlines, but it doesn’t pay the bills now. And paying the bills now is Clinton’s top priority. Why? Because campaigns don’t end when the candidate decides he/she has had enough (because he/she never has enough). Campaigns end when the candidate can’t pay to keep the lights on.

Clinton also can’t stand any superdelegate defections or to suddenly have dozens of supers on the “negotiation” line suddenly stop answering their phones or ignoring Hillary’s e-mails. Money and superdelegates were about to slip away from Hillary if she kept Penn.

His departure, by the way, was not cause for panic, concern, alarm, remorse, regret, sadness, nostalgia or nausea in Hillaryland. Indeed, those were the reactions to Penn’s continued presence.

“Penn will always be linked to one strategic approach and one strategic approach only for Hillary’s campaign,” said Tony Coelho, former campaign manager for Al Gore in 2000. “And that was inevitability.

Penn cast Hillary as inevitable and everything flowed from that. But inevitable became imperial and began to hurt her. And then as the inevitable one, she didn’t compete in caucuses because she wouldn’t need them. If she had competed in those caucuses she would have won some and finished strong in the rest and would be ahead in delegates now. But Penn was all about inevitability. That drove institutional money to Hillary but it also drove grassroots money to Obama.”

Chris Kofinis served as John Edwards’ communications director and said the Edwards camp never understood Clinton’s approach to the race as the candidate of inevitability.

“Who roots for the inevitable candidate,” Kofinis asked. “It’s like Saturday’s NCAA national semi-final. Everyone expected North Carolina to wipe the floor with Kansas. So who do people cheer for? Kansas.”

Kofinis said Clinton’s pitch as the inevitable candidate helped her consolidate her base but left little or no room to expand the base. “Inevitability isn’t a rationale to vote for someone.”

Clinton adopted other approaches and campaign pitches, of course. She keyed on experience and results-oriented solutions. She then cast herself as a fighter .

She’s now casting herself as the manager of the Democrats’ Buyer’s Remorse Emporium. All of these appeals to voters came after the bubble of inevitability burst.

“Where campaigns end has a lot to do with where they begin,” Coelho said. “That’s where this one began.”

Coelho said he believes Obama could win Pennsylvania. As I write that, Dick Bennett at American Research Group, has just released a poll in Pennyslvania that shows Clinton and Obama tied at 45 percent. ARG’s numbers have been shaky this year but this is the second poll since Wednesday to show the race tied. Several other polls have showed Clinton’s lead shrinking. Whether the race is actually tied or not is less important than the inescapable truth that the trend favors Obama.

Every Democrat I talk to believes if Clinton loses Pennyslvania the race ends there. Why? Because Clinton has defined it as a can’t-lose, must-win state and Democrats eager to end the prolonged battle for the nomination will conclude Obama can win a “big state.”

More importantly, they will conclude that Democrats in an ethnically, economically, educationally and religiously diverse state will have sized up the candidates and the race and said we know the deal, and the race ends now. Obama’s the nominee. Let’s fight the Republicans.

The coverage of Penn’s departure will play up the sense of chaos and disorder at Hillary’s headquarters in Arlington, Va.

I have a different take. I believe Penn’s departure, while bad for headlines, could be good for the candidate and very good for her over-worked and beleaguered senior staff.

If Penn’s detractors are to believed, he had a suffocating effect on Clinton’s team, more probably than she fully realized. It is possible that those in Hillaryland who have smoldered for weeks or months about Penn’s approach to the campaign will find new freedom and new energy and the campaign will find within itself a sense of possibility and renewal. We will know the answer to this question within a week in terms of Clinton’s speeches and ads.

Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh believes that’s already happened with Clinton’s crisper and more economically focused stump speech. Clinton has also looked fresher and more inventive with ideas last to woo on-line donors by having them direct where in Pennsylvania their contribution will be spent and a new ad in North Carolina (where Clinton trails) soliciting questions about the economy that Clinton will answer in subsequent TV spots (yes, that’s a canned conversation, but it at least has a bit more flair than the standard TV spots and offers the prospect of more ads, signaling the campaign isn’t on its deathbed). If ever a campaign needed a blast of energy, enthusiasm and rebirth, it’s this one. Penn’s exit offers that possibility. But only that.

The more conventional analysis of Penn’s ouster is that the smell of death will overwhelm the staff and they will grow ever more morose at the loss of their chief scapegoat. That depression will only deepen into lethargy, the theory goes, with the realization that Penn’s heading back to his mega-bucks job at Burson while their own resumes and reputations will be forever smudged (tainted?) by the massive failure of the most “inevitable” campaign in American presidential history.

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First broadcast was Friday night on Hannity & Colmes.

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After Barack Obama’s speech in San Antonio (after he lost Ohio but before he knew he lost the primary in Texas), his chief strategist David Axelrod spoke briefly to The Bourbon Room about the outcome of Super Tuesday Part II and the campaign ahead.

Here is the transcript:

First The Bourbon Room asked how Obama’s camp would deal with the perception that Clinton has slowed Obama’s momentum and fought herself back into the race:

“Well, that’s a perception that they’re spinning, but they set their own test. It’s not our delegate riff, they started the delegate riff. Their delegate riff was that “We are going to wipe out the delegate lead on March 4.” The fact is they haven’t changed their situation at all. They may have changed perceptions a little bit. We don’t know what’s happening here in Texas, we’ll see what happens in Texas, but we’re probably going to win the delegate fight here in Texas. Ultimately, this is a race for delegates. We’ve got a substantial lead. We’ve won 28 contests to their 13. We’ve won more popular votes. We’ve won in every part of the country. We’ve put together a coalition of independents, Democrats and Republicans. We’ve energized young people in a way they haven’t been in a generation. And we’ve shown the ability to put together a coaltion that is going to take on John McCain and beat John McCain and that’s why we’re doing so much better than she in so many polls against McCain. I don’t think this materially changes anything. It may extend the race, but I don’t think it’s going to change the outcome.”

The Bourbon Room then asked: “They hit you hard, are you going to hit hard back?”

Axelrod: “I think we’re willing to join the debate. If they want to define the debate in terms of the issues they’ve laid out in the past week, if they want to throw the kitchen sink, they’re going to engender a response. If they want to have a discussion about ethics, then we’ll have a discussion about ethics. If they want to have a discussion about who is prepared to be commander in chief, then we’re going to ask the hard questions about the decisions that’s she’s made. If she wants to say she’s going to be a steward of the economy, and talk about her accomplishments in public life, then we’re going to talk about that. It isn’t going to be a one-way debate. “

It will be very interesting to see how far Obama’s campaign goes with its response/reaction to Clinton now. If Axelrod follows through on discussing Clinton’s ethics, commander-in-chief qualifications and capability to run the economy in the context of hard, negative ads against Clinton, the campaign will cross yet another Rubicon. Hillary Clinton crossed one with the “3 a.m.” ad and the risk paid off. The Clinton camp knew there could be a backlash among Democrats who resent using terror fears to make a political point. The gamble paid off as exit polling data shows the “3 a.m.” ad helped Clinton reverse the slide and eke out a victory in Texas. Obama would run the risk, if he ran negative ads, of abandoning his “new brand of politics,” but it might also prove his grit and determination to win — something Democrats in and out of the trenches now question.

We’ll see if Axelrod was venting or plotting. And we’ll see soon enough.

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The race wil turn again today. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will emerge from Super Tuesday Part II as co-front-runners. That’s the consensus of more and more Democrats watching this race from the trenches and from afar.

The most likely scenario tonight, according to top officials in both campaigns, is Clinton wins Ohio and Rhode Island comfortably and fights Obama to a tie or ekes out a victory in Texas in the popular vote. The only safe state in the Obama column this morning, by mutual agreement of both camps, is Vermont.

The question in Texas is who wins the pledged delegates alloted from the primary and subsequent caucuses. Obama could win the delegate hunt while still losing the popular vote because of the weighting of delegates in African-America state senate districts and those allocated through the caucus process where Obama’s grassroots organization may out-perform Clinton’s.

Obama’s Texas operatives have grown more nervous about Obama’s prospects in Texas since Friday. They readily concede the “3 a.m.” ad from Clinton changed the dynamic and undecided voters began to move toward Clinton over the weekend.

Clinton’s lead in Ohio, according to Clinton field organizers, sits at about 6 points but there is a sense that late-breaking voters — as they have in the past — are moving toward Clinton and her margin of victory could exceed 6 points there.

Already, the Obama camp is out with a Super Tuesday Part II pre-buttal. Chief spokesman Bill Burton sent the following e-mail to campaign reporters at 9 a.m. EST:

“The Clinton campaign said this race was all about delegates and that they would be tied or ahead by morning. But despite the 20-point lead in Ohio and Texas that Senator Clinton had just two weeks ago, we will still be well ahead in delegates tonight and they will have failed at achieving their plainly stated goals. They have floated proposal after proposal to try to subvert the will of Democratic voters and retrospectively change the rules of the nominating process, but the bottom line is that it will still be virtually impossible for them to catch up in delegates after tonight.”

To this, Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, had this direct response to The Bourbon Room placing that Burton quote before him on a conference call with reporters at 11:30 a.m EST:

“First, I would invite anyone on this call to judge, based on those remarks, who thinks there in a better position in Ohio and Texas. Two, here’s the bottom line: this party is not going to nominate someone against John McCain who can’t pass the commander in chief test and can’t pass the steward of the economy test. And I think we’re going to see tonight voters saying Sen. Obama has not passed that test. I think it is that simple. We are simply not going to nominate someone who voters have doubts about as commander in chief and steward of the economy.”

Since Clinton, as The Bourbon Room noted Sunday, framed Texas as the place for the debate on national security and Ohio as the place for the debate on stewardship of the economy, that was Wolfson’s way of predicting victories in Texas and Ohio — without actually saying so.

The results tonight will raise significant questions about Obama’s campaign, some of which are already being asked in Democratic circles.

Why wasn’t his campaign able to win these four contests and definitively end the fight for the nomination, especially after having a massive financial advantage that blanketed the airwaves in Texas and Ohio with ads that ran four and five times more frequently than Clinton’s (last Thursday night in Houston, The Bourbon Room saw 10 Obama ads in the space of an hour without seeing one Clinton ad). The true party experts will also ponder, if Obama fails to win Ohio and Texas, how the grassroots and TV and radio ad efforts of the Service Employees International Union and United Food and Commerical Workers. These endorsements were supposed to cement Obama’s hold on both states and give him the added organizational power and media message to put both big states away. Increasingly, it appears these organizational and media advantages will have been squandered.

This could raise new questions in the mind of Superdelegates as to Obama’s staying power and political prowess. The Obama camp will argue that it trailed badly to Clinton in both states, fought hard and lost but still leads in pledged delegates and the race is still, basically, over. That’s the core of Burton’s argument above. They will further argue that Superdelegates should move to Obama to avoid a nasty seven-week campaign in Pennsylvania where Obama is going to be bloodied by Clinton and weakened for the upcoming contest with McCain.

The Clinton camp will argue that where it has fought Obama and fought him hard, it has won and that MUST matter. The Clinton camp has stalled defections of Superdelegates by privately making — in so many words — the following argument: don’t defect to Obama, not until March 4. Let us fight until March 4 and if we win, stay neutral or re-evaluate Hillary as a potential nominee.

Many Superdelegates have accepted this wait-and-see approach. The ones — about 40 — who have gone to Obama were not willing to wait and feared that even if Clinton lost Ohio or Texas she wouldn’t drop out.

Clinton will clearly not drop out. She’s heading straight to Pennsylvania after her victory celebration and, as The Bourbon Room predicted on Sunday, we are now heading to Super Tuesday Part III.

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Sen. Obama came to the back of the press plane to talk informally about anything but politics. Family time - or the lack of it- and the Fishbowl for his two daughters if he wins.

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Hillary Clinton’s top priority has been changing lately depending on where she’s campaigning, a strategy that Clinton is banking on to appeal to voters in the crucial states of Ohio and Texas, which vote in primaries and caucuses on Tuesday.

In Texas, Clinton’s focused on national security. Her “3 a.m.” television ad, which asks voters who they trust to manage a crisis, hit the airwaves on Friday and her campaign is emphasizing the issue in many discussions in the Lone Star State.

In Ohio on Sunday, Clinton told a sparsely attended but enthusiastic rally in Austintown that “the economy is the No. 1 issue in this campaign.”

While some might call this rhetorical schizophrenia, it’s about a specific targeting strategy that will determine whether Clinton emerges from Super Tuesday 2 as a credible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

With 11 straight losses lending a funereal air to her campaign in the last week, Clinton has soldiered on and still holds a narrow lead against Barack Obama in Ohio. She appears to have slightly narrowed the gap in Texas.

Clinton’s gambling on national security to draw conservative so-called “Yellow Dog Democrats” in east and central-west Texas. The campaign is counting on this breed of voter supporting Clinton after re-evaluating Obama’s credentials and his backbone to withstand the rigors of a national security crisis.

“We’re on our turf now,” said a senior Clinton adviser, referring to the national security debate.

In Ohio, where the “3 a.m.” ad is not running at all (it’s only airing sporadically in Texas), the economy rules and the good news for Clinton is in Sunday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer poll, which puts Clinton up 47 percent to 43 percent over Obama.

The issue of free trade does not seem to be hurting Clinton as hard as advisers feared it might.

“The issue should be killing us and it’s not,” a top Clinton field organizer in Ohio told FOX News.

The Plain Dealer poll showed Obama and Clinton essentially split on the North American Free Trade Agreement, a trade deal passed during Bill Clinton’s presidency and widely blamed for bleeding the state of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

Obama has stoked anti-NAFTA sentiments across the state and reads widely from praiseworthy comments Clinton has uttered in the past.

A tie on NAFTA gives Clinton a fighting chance to win Ohio, owing to her solid support among women and growing support among low-income white men.

Obama’s counter-strategy is to out-organize Clinton on the ground. Volunteers are pouring into Ohio from across the country — largely on their own dime — to canvass for Obama this weekend. The campaign’s goal is to knock on 1 million doors this weekend.

Obama also has the grassroots support of the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union — big assets in the state’s larger cities.

In Texas, Obama’s camp says it is not worrying about the national security debate.

“Our judgment on this issue in the campaign has been just as solid as Obama’s in opposing the Iraq war,” a senior adviser said. “We know Democrats were drawn to us because of Barack’s opposition to the war and this gives an opportunity to remind Democrats of that.”

Obama has better ground forces in Texas also — at least three times as many on-the-ground volunteers as Clinton — and he is far better prepared to organize and win the post-primary caucuses on Tuesday evening.

The key for Obama is to win the popular vote and delegates distributed through primary and caucus returns and to deny Clinton any opportunity to diminish the Texas results by blaming the complicated two-step primary and caucus process — unique on the election calendar this year. If Clinton only extracts a victory in Ohio on Tuesday, Obama will argue she’s failed her own Texas-Ohio test and ought to contemplate leaving the race.

Top Democrats who thought it likely March 4 would be Clinton’s last stand now fret that close contests in Ohio and Texas could leave the outcome opaque and give Clinton a reason to fight on — especially after raising $35 million in February.

“She’ll say I raised all that money and a million dollars a day on the Internet and those people don’t want me to quit,” a top Democratic strategist said.

Another Democrat who served in the Clinton administration but has soured on the Clinton political machine said: “Too much time since the last vote (the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary) has allowed Hillary to pick herself up off the floor.”

A muddled Super Tuesday Part 2 could send the campaign into a seven-week trek through Pennsylvania before its April 22 primary.

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Sen. Obama came to the back of the press plane to talk informally about anything but politics. Family time - or the lack of it- and the Fishbowl for his two daughters if he wins the presidency dominated the brief encounter. 

http://media2.foxnews.com/030308/030308_obama_plane_MPEG4.mp4

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