RON FOURNIER
Associated Press
February 20, 2008
The Democratic nomination is now Barack Obama’s to lose.
After 10 consecutive defeats — including a heartbreaker in tailor-made Wisconsin on Tuesday — Hillary Rodham Clinton can’t win the nomination unless Obama makes a major mistake or her allies reveal something damaging about the Illinois senator’s background. Don’t count her out quite yet, but Wisconsin revealed deep and destructive fractures in the Clinton coalition.
It’s panic-button time.
That explains why Clinton’s aides accused Obama of plagiarism for delivering a speech that included words that had first been uttered by Deval Patrick, the Massachusetts governor and a friend of Obama. The charge bordered on the hypocritical — Clinton herself has borrowed Obama’s lines — and by itself was unlikely to have an impact on the race.
Clinton claimed Tuesday that reporters, not her campaign, pushed the plagiarism story line. That is not true.
The Clinton camp hopes to produce other instances of rhetorical theft and show a pattern of bad behavior. The danger for Obama is anything that undercuts his image as a candidate who rises above politics. Something like this might work to Clinton’s advantage: Obama is backtracking on a pledge to abide by spending caps in the general election, and his explanation is bogus.
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