Obama Supporters Increasingly Confident

This story was written by Ben Smith, Avi Zenilman, and Kenneth P. Vogel.

With three landslide victories in Tuesday's "Chesapeake Primary" in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., and a widening lead by any measure of delegates, Senator Barack Obama's supporters have begun to suggest a case that, just a few months ago, was coming from Hillary Rodham Clinton: He's a lock.

In a conference call with reporters before polls closed Tuesday, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe cited "the cold, hard reality of the math."

"I don't think it's so much about momentum as the reality of the math," he said, citing the campaign's success in building a small but unmistakable lead among pledged delegates. "If we continue to do that, mathematical reality sets in and it becomes harder and harder to overcome."

Plouffe's aim was to begin the process of massing uncommitted Democratic leaders behind a front-running Obama, the same end to which Clinton and her aides wielded her high poll numbers last year.

The stress on Obama's delegate lead was also the opening of an effort to muscle Clinton - now trailing by almost any count of delegates - from the race.

But on the numbers, Plouffe has a point. An analysis of the delegate count by Politico indicates that Obama's wide margins in contests over the last week mean that Clinton will be forced to answer with not just victories, but landslides of her own, in the big states on which she is staking her hopes - Ohio and Texas, which vote March 4.

"We're going to sweep across Texas in the next three weeks, bringing our message about what we need in America: The kind of president that will be required on day one to be commander in chief, to turn the economy around," Clinton told a crowd of thousands in El Paso Thursday night. "I'm tested. I'm ready. Let's make this happen."

This exhortation came hours after her campaign announced the departure of her deputy campaign manager, Mike Henry, in the latest reflection of staff turmoil.

Clinton's challenge is to keep the count of pledged delegates close, while protecting her lead among the party officials known as "superdelegates," who can vote independently at the Democratic National convention - but who may be reluctant to defy the popular vote.

The Obama campaign now argues that the superdelegates should follow the majority of the pledged delegates.

Clinton, meanwhile, has sought to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the process by which pledged delegates are chosen, arguing that caucuses aren't true reflections of the will of the people, and that the exclusion of Florida and Michigan voters because of a dispute over the primary calendar taints the official tallies.

But Obama's lead in pledged delegates widened Tuesday night to more than 100, even by conservative estimates, and there's no indication that it will narrow before March.

There are 573 delegates up for grabs between March 4 and April 22. For Clinton to even things up, she needs to get about 60 percent of them - the sort of margin she won in her home state of New York.

Obama's dramatic victories Tuesday also put him ahead in the count of pledged delegates even if Florida, whose delegates have not been recognized by the Democratic National Committee, was permitted to seat a delegation.

And his victories put him ahead even in counts that include superdelegates.

"This is the new American majority. This is what change looks like," Obama said in a speech to an audience of thousands in Madison, Wisconsin Tuesday night.

Obama's wins were his sixth, seventh, and eighth in a row, and even as Clinton looks forward to March 4, his campaign is looking with relish on Wisconsin and his home state of Hawaii, which vote a week from today.

His widening coalition is becoming part of his message: He won a majority of Latino votes - which had been Clinton's bulwark elsewhere - in Virginia and Maryland.

He won a majority of white men in both states, and won the support of groups across the economic spectrum, while drawing stunning majorities of support from African-American voters - as high as 90% of their support in Virginia, according to exit polls.

The wide margins - he won with 64% of the vote in Virginia, and appeared headed for victory on a similar scale in Maryland- seemed to answer the Clinton campaign's arguments that he has not won primaries in large states.

And Obama moved clearly into one traditional frontrunner's role Tuesday night, trading blows with the likely Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, in their respective victory speeches.

"John McCain is an American hero. We honor his service to our nation. But his priorities don't address the real problems of the American people, because they are bound to the failed policies of the past," Obama said in Wisconsin.

"Senator McCain said the other day that we might be mired for a hundred years in Iraq, which is reason enough to not give him four years in the White House."

McCain, for his part, jabbed at Obama's lofty rhetoric of hope in his own remarks in Virginia.

"Hope, my friends, is a powerful thing. I can attest to that better than many, for I have seen men's hopes tested in hard and cruel ways that few will ever experience," he said, continuing, however, that "to encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude."

And McCain concluded by stealing Obama's signature line.

"My friends, I promise you, I am fired up and ready to go," he said.
By Ben Smith, Avi Zenilman, and Kenneth P. Vogel