Clinton and Obama Face Off Again in Texas Debate

Hillary Clinton finds herself in a Catch 22 as she approaches the make-or-break Texas and Ohio primaries.

Normally, a politician trying to check an opponent’s surge will go negative to alert voters to his flaws, to bring up his foibles, to say he’s not ready for prime time.

It’s not clear that works for a female politician without doing more harm to her than to her opponent.

But what is clear is that, so far, it’s not working for this woman.

Clinton and Barack Obama face off again tonight in the first of two debates before the March 4 primaries. Obama is still savoring hefty victories in Wisconsin and Hawaii Tuesday. He continued to erode her base with women, with less prosperous voters and with union members, despite her specific economic game plans that contrast with his far more vague ones.

On Wednesday, she said it was time “to get real about the challenges facing America,” to move from “good words to good works, from sound bites to sound solutions.”

As he has done before, Obama labeled Clinton’s attacks as symptomatic of the political divisiveness of the past. He offers a different future, he says, “a new politics of common sense, of common purpose, of shared sacrifice and shared prosperity.”

In the past week, surrogates have attempted to make the case that Clinton is vastly more experienced, that Obama is dangerously unprepared for the challenges that will face the next president. Some political and economic columnists for the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others, are taking new and critical looks at Obama and raising some red flags.

But that doesn’t seem to dent Obama’s momentum. He took Wisconsin by a landslide, 58-41, including with blue-collar workers presumed to be part of a Clinton base. She and Obama split the votes of women, including single women. She had a clear edge only with voters 65 and older.

“She can’t personally attack him—people are sick to death of that,” says Linda Tarr-Whelan, a women’s rights activist supporting Clinton. “But she’s got to raise doubt on whether he can deliver or not. And I don’t know why she doesn’t make more of what she’s done in the Senate, on foreign policy, on women in the developing world. These are issues she could use to show how she could produce,” while questioning what Obama has done.

Tarr-Whelan said Clinton needs more issues like the health care plans to draw distinctions between her and Obama.

She didn’t think much of the Clinton campaign’s revelations about Obama “borrowing” rhetoric from his good friend Deval Patrick, now governor of Massachusetts. The Republican National Committee did like those, however, and put out a release showing that Obama also may have picked up some key rhetoric from then-Senator John Edwards’ 2004 presidential campaign to use in 2008. David Axelrod, who is Obama’s political guru, also has done work for Patrick and for Edwards, in 2004.

Clinton got a little help from a Texas state senator in her contention that Obama hasn’t accomplished much as a politician. When MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews asked Obama supporter Kirk Watson to name some of Obama’s legislative achievements, the state senator couldn’t come up with a single item. It was embarrassing dead air—something that the Clinton campaign sent around the circuit.

The probable Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, also went on the offensive, attacking Obama as naïve in his foreign policy pronouncements and dismissing his “eloquent but empty call for change.”

But primary voters may not care. Obama and his wife Michelle were featured on three national magazine covers this week, and “Obamamania” is much dissected in the media.

Amy Walter of The Hotline said this isn’t about policy, it’s about personalities. Voters think they know Clinton and, since the first polls were taken nearly two years ago, rarely gave her more than a majority vote. They weren’t necessarily hostile—but they wanted to keep looking.

They did and, now, many say Obama is their man.