SAN ANTONIO, Texas—At the end of another day on which Barack Obama failed to deliver the coup de grace to Hillary Clinton’s White House hopes, the Illinois senator spoke to supporters here at an event that was notable mainly for its tepidity.
The crowd was startlingly small, numbering perhaps 1,500. Obama often attracts crowds 10 times as large. His speech was brief—it lasted barely 10 minutes—and featured few of the oratorical fireworks for which he is known.
Obama did, however, seek to reassure his followers: “We are on our way to winning this nomination,” he said.
He also trained his sights on John McCain, presumably seeking to position himself as McCain’s inevitable opponent in November’s presidential election. He added that McCain and Clinton “echo each other” in trying to portray his demands for change as “eloquent but empty.”
The day’s results, which saw Clinton win three states, including the big prizes of Texas and Ohio, to Obama’s one, must nevertheless have come as a frustrating blow. The race for the nomination now seems destined to continue until at least the Pennsylvania primary on April 22.
Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, hinted to reporters that the senator may now become more aggressive toward the Clinton team and might begin raising questions about the ethics of Hillary and Bill Clinton.
When I asked Axelrod whether the apparent effectiveness of the former first lady’s more negative tone in recent days posed a problem for Obama, he responded: “If Senator Clinton wants to take the debate to various places, we’ll join that debate. We’ll do it on our own terms and we’ll do it in our own way. But if she wants to make issues like ethics and disclosure and law firms and real estate deals and all that sort of stuff issues, I don’t know why they’d want to go there.”
The words seemed like an allusion to Whitewater, but Axelrod in fact cited the Clintons’ reluctance to release their tax returns as one example where “for all their yammering about how unfairly they have been treated, they haven’t really been pursued at all by the media on some of these questions.”
Obama did not get entangled in any of this during his speech, instead telling his supporters that “because of a movement you built that stretches from Vermont’s Green Mountains to the streets of San Antonio, we can stand up with clarity and confidence to say that we are turning the page.”
His address was also unusual for its touches of internationalism. He referred to the Ugandan grandfather of an aide who, aged 81, had stayed up through the night in Africa to watch the results of the Iowa caucuses come in. He added: “The world is watching what we do here. The world is paying attention to how we conduct ourselves. What will they see? What will we tell them?”
At another point, the Illinois senator suggested that an Obama administration would prove an effective antidote to the anti-Americanism now festering in many nations around the world.
Axelrod stuck with more prosaic concerns. At one point, he implored reporters to look more seriously at the former first lady’s claims of political achievement.
“You hear Senator Clinton talk and you would think that she was Lyndon Johnson in the U.S. Senate,” he said. “But I don’t know what her major legislative achievements are.”
More importantly, perhaps, Axelrod also predicted that “the party will coalesce” behind one candidate, “if not tonight, then soon.”
But last night’s results have, at the least, almost certainly postponed any such move to bring this contest to a swift conclusion.
