Her Key Two Weeks

Last night's Democratic primary has settled little. Mr. Obama won outright, but because the party apportions delegates according to the percentage of support, the state offered him a relatively small advantage over Senator Clinton. But while Mr. Obama remains the frontrunner and favorite eventually to win his party's nomination, Mrs. Clinton can comfort herself that she did not suffer an outright rout.

Mr. Obama may have won nine states in a row, but the killer blow still eludes him and it increasingly looks as if we must wait until the early morning of March 5 before we discover who Senator McCain must meet in November.

Eight days ago, as she was awaiting a drubbing in the Potomac Primary, Mrs. Clinton flew to Texas to try to head off what, on March 4, may yet turn out to be her Alamo. The cable news networks' armchair generals, who have been so wrong about so much in this extraordinary primary race, said she was making a cardinal mistake to fail to campaign immediately in Wisconsin.

Mrs. Clinton's people, for their part, conceded that Wisconsin now appeared to be unpromising territory for their candidate, who was planning largely to ignore the state and spend most of her time until March 4 defending her lead over Mr. Obama in the big delegate states of Texas and Ohio. But the Clinton camp's apparent lack of concern about Wisconsin, and their acknowledgement that they half expected to lose there, was disingenuous.

The golden rule of primaries, and one of the few old certainties to hold true this year, is that each race is an expectations game. And convincing commentators that Wisconsin was a lost cause for Mrs. Clinton was little more than a ruse. Wisconsin was perfect territory for her. Voters there are overwhelmingly white, largely blue collar, mostly women. Their main concern is not who voted or did not vote for the Iraq War but bread and butter issues like mortgage rates, home foreclosures, and factory closings. All these issues Mrs. Clinton has made her own.

Last night's result in Wisconsin showed how canny the Clintons are at gaming the Democratic race. Instead of an outright loss, Mrs. Clinton can claim to have turned Wisconsin into a narrow defeat. What is more, the state kept Mr. Obama on the defense. Instead of steaming to victory, he was obliged to spend $500,000 on television commercials in Wisconsin, four times as much as Mrs. Clinton.

Wisconsin became a testing ground for the competing and often conflicting campaign strategies now being advocated in the Clinton high command. Like the Spanish Civil War was a mere proving ground for the German military, a ghoulish dress rehearsal for World War II, so Wisconsin soon emerged as a dry run for the increasingly tight and, one must now expect, ill tempered races in Texas and Ohio in 20 days.

Guided by her hastily readjusted top team, Mrs. Clinton went on the air with negative television commercials in Wisconsin, highlighting the gaping hole in Mr. Obama's "universal" health care plan, his failure to vote one way or the other when an Illinois senator, and much else. Their impact appeared to have somewhat stemmed the Obama tide in the state, so over the next two weeks we can expect more, and more savage, assaults upon Mr. Obama's promises, his voting record, and his personality.

The accusations of plagiarism by Senator Clinton's aides against Senator Obama, who used many of the same phrases as Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, were also more artful than they at first appeared. Mrs. Clinton's team's charge was, on the face of it, trivial and of little obvious importance. Which politician is truly original in their thoughts or rhetoric? The borrowing was hardly as damaging to Senator Obama as Senator Biden's wholesale theft from a speech by the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock's.

Yet the complaint of copying others struck at the heart of Senator Obama's appeal. If, as Mrs. Clinton contends, Mr. Obama's high falutin' ideas couched in soaring poetry are incapable of solving the many intractable problems the country faces, then the fact that he was passing off the inspirational cadences of others as his own showed that his words were even more empty than she had first claimed.

Just as importantly, the plagiarism charge, which may turn out to be just a one day wonder, ensured that Mr. Obama's message was smothered on Monday, the last full campaigning day. The Obama campaign can expect that the pace and the virulence of Mrs. Clinton's assaults to accelerate for the rest of the month.

Mrs. Clinton may also claim that in Wisconsin, an open registration state where voters could walk in from the street and pick their party and candidate, she won the majority of traditional Democratic voters. Mr. Obama attracted the largest share of the 27% of voters in the Democratic primary who declared themselves as independents and, one suspects, all 9% of those voting in the Democratic primary who were Republicans.

Mr. Obama can take solace in the fact that, notwithstanding Mrs. Clinton's slings and arrows, he has made steady progress in eating away at her base of support. Until Wisconsin, Mrs. Clinton could depend upon the loyalty of women and blue collar workers Last night, in a state which boasts vast numbers of working women, Mrs. Clinton was left only with only one key demographic, women over the age of 50.

Senator Clinton now faces the two most important weeks of her life. On her campaigning skills will depend whether she gets the chance to represent her party in November and whether she may become the first woman president. With the stakes that high, Mr. Obama is in for a bumpy ride.

nwapshott@nysun.com