ObamaTracker

Commentator Discusses Obama's Financing Strategy

Key quote: "As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama has proven he's 'better, stronger, faster' than any other Democrat in the race. He's the Six-Hundred Million Dollar Man.

Last week, he opted out of the national campaign finance regime and is banking on his fundraising track record to build a war chest unlike any this country has seen since Richard Nixon's in 1972.

As the late Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen once said, 'A billion here, a billion there -- pretty soon you're talking real money.' But what can Obama and the Democrats do with all the money they expect to raise?"

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First Obama Attack Book Out in August

Key quote: "The same publisher that distributed the 2004 best-seller that took aim at John Kerry’s Vietnam service is planning a summer release of what’s scheduled to be the first critical book on Barack Obama."

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'Stunning joke' re Hillary, Obama

Key quote:  "It is perhaps a task greater than the writer's skill to attempt to cast Hillary Clinton as the victim. I laughed audibly when the author asserted the Democratic Party is trying to 'stab her in the back'. The joke, of course, is that Hillary Clinton IS the Democratic party establishment. That she is now losing its support is due more to her own unsavoury campaign tactics and Obama's stronger electability than some vast left wing misogynistic conspiracy (I hope your writer gets that joke)."

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Has Obama Crested?

Key quote:  "Every political prediction these days is worth its weight in words. I don't think he has peaked, but I think he is finally cresting. He has dazzled people with his rhetoric and presentation. But after the victory this week at the Potomac primaries he gave a 25-minute speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and if you look past the rhetoric and presentation and focus on the words, what you see is a candidate running on a vision of America that is grim."

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Smart Move: Obama Goes Populist In the Home Stretch

Key quote:  "But with the next round of states overrepresenting for the constituencies Obama has done most poorly among - working-class whites and Latinos - he knows he has to try to thread the needle. He has to try to offer up more full-throated, class-based populism. And indeed, that's what he's doing."

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Analysis: Obama Wave Crashes Through

Key quote:  "From the beginning, Obama has faced the challenge of turning an air of excitement and energy into a movement on the ground and votes in the ballot box. In what's been called the Potomac Primary, he has gone a long way toward completing that task."

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Obama's natural enemy

Key quote:  "Except the Obama of 2008 faces an obstacle the Clinton of 1992 never had to endure. He is up against a wholly novel phenomenon in US politics: the double-headed presidential candidate. All week in South Carolina he has done battle with not just his main opponent, but that opponent's spouse, the pair commanding as much media attention as if both their names were on the ballot. What's more - and this is a problem Bill Clinton never faced - one of those two adversaries is the most effective campaigner in modern political history: one William Jefferson Clinton."

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Obama, McCain Bookend the Boomer Age

Key quote:  "

If the Republicans are moving into 2008 haunted by--and trying to forget--the Bush-Cheney legacy, the Democrats are being increasingly stung by their own previous White House incumbent. Bill Clinton's recent finger-wagging tirades are unbecoming of a former president, and he is proving to be an embarrassment rather than an asset to the Hillary Clinton Campaign.

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Momentum turns toward Obama in S.C.

Key quote:  "The uncertainty about Obama's success was born from African Americans' own insecurity: They could not believe, that in this day and age, when racism is still endemic, that an African American would come so close to winning the Democratic primary. (A recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll underlines this. Asked if the country is ready for a black president, 72 percent of whites answered yes; only 61 percent of blacks answered yes.)"

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Obama and the Grumpy Old Men

Key quote:  "But the bitterness of the tone and the content of the offensive point to deeper roots: could it be that these men, highly successful in their fields against scarring odds, resent the arriviste Obama?"

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