College Times

WASHINGTON _ Sen. Barack Obama pulled slightly ahead in the intense fight for Democratic presidential nominating delegates Tuesday by sweeping the Potomac Primary as Sen. Hillary Clinton quickly shifted her focus toward territory more favorable to her in Texas and Ohio.

Obama won Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia by wide margins, breaking recent voting patterns to score well with women voters _ a constituency that had sustained Clinton's victories in earlier contests. He also continued to dominate with African Americans and young people while expanding his strength among whites.

Voters in the nation's capital, its suburbs and neighboring states in the Potomac River basin swarmed to the nominating contests, with first-time voters making a surprising showing even as a frigid day turned into an icy winter night and some polls stayed open late.

The voters handed Obama a decisive win in D.C., where many residents owe their living to the governmental culture of which the Illinois Democrat is so often critical. He easily swept the district, where more than half the Democratic electorate is black, and was doing well in Maryland, home to a large population of the high-earning and educated voters who also tend to prefer him.

Virginia was the most striking vote of confidence because the makeup of its electorate was most favorable to Clinton among the three contests. Though Virginia hasn't voted for the Democratic presidential nominee since 1964, its last two governors have been Democrats and one of its two senators, Jim Webb, won his seat in the 2006 elections. Democratic party leaders are nurturing hopes of winning there in the 2008 presidential election.

On Tuesday night, Obama traveled to Wisconsin, which holds its primary next Tuesday, and was greeted by a crowd of nearly 17,000 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

"At this moment the cynics can no longer say our hope is false," Obama said, noting that he had won "East and West, North and South."

"We won the state of Maryland," he said. "We won the Commonwealth of Virginia. And though we won in Washington D.C., this movement won't stop until there's change in Washington."

Clinton spent the evening in Texas, a state she is counting on to stop the Obama march and where she is aggressively courting the working class, Latino and women voters who have formed a powerful coalition for her to date.

"There's a saying in Texas, `All hat and no cattle,'" she told a buoyant crowd at an El Paso rally Tuesday night, poking fun explicitly at President Bush and implicitly, perhaps, Obama. "We need a lot less hat and a lot more cattle. Texas needs a president who actually understands what it's going to take to turn the economy around, to get us universal health care."

The series of victories could prove to be a crucial event in the race. He has now won eight contests in a row, a feat that could lend momentum to his campaign on the way to the Hawaii caucus and Wisconsin primary next week and then the key primaries of March and April.

The most important primaries in the Clinton calculus are March 4 in Ohio and Texas, which she is counting on as bulwarks to thwart Obama's momentum.

Aides to Clinton argue that the effects of Obama momentum have been overstated. Many political pundits were ready to call the New Hampshire primary for Obama after he won the Iowa caucuses in early January, they point out, only to look sheepish when Clinton won.

Still, Clinton's camp is changing its organization for the next round of primaries. Late Tuesday came news that a Clinton deputy campaign manager had resigned, continuing a revamp of the campaign operation that began two days before with the replacement of campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle.

At the Obama camp, aides said momentum doesn't figure into their game plan.

"I don't think it's so much about momentum as the reality of the math," said David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager. "We have a healthy pledged delegate lead and we intend to build on it and grow that lead."

In any case, the Potomac results are more than a psychological boost. Obama won by large margins and picked up a raft of new pledged delegates, by some counts overtaking Clinton in the race for those representatives at the party convention.

He showed signs of cutting into Clinton's reliable support, winning as many as six in ten votes from women in both Maryland and Virginia, according to exit polls.

Clinton is counting on working-class voters and her economic message _ with its frequent nods to the nation's prosperity when her husband was president in the 1990s _ to carry her to victory in Ohio and Texas.

But in Virginia, Obama beat her among voters earning less than $50,000 a year, union members and those who said the economy was their primary concern, according to exit polls.

In addition to Ohio and Texas, Clinton is also counting on the voters of Pennsylvania on April 22. Her supporters there include Gov. Ed Rendell, who lends his considerable political infrastructure, but, like other Clinton surrogates, speaks his mind sometimes to the point of being provocative.

On Tuesday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted Rendell saying that white Pennsylvanians are likely to vote against Obama because he is black.

"You've got conservative whites here," Rendell told the paper's editorial board, "and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate."

That was not a problem for Obama in Virginia, where the two Democrats came close to splitting the white vote on Tuesday. And, asked in exit polling if the country is ready for a woman president or black president, more than eight in ten voters of Virginia voters said "yes."

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