Stressing electability, Obama has a ways to go

Senator Barack Obama greeted supporters during a rally at the Taco Bell Arena at Boise State University yesterday. Hillary Clinton still leads in most national polls and enjoys broader name recognition. (CHIP SOMODEVILLA/Getty Images)

ALBUQUERQUE - Exactly three months before the New Hampshire primary, Senator Barack Obama sat down for dinner with a handful of reporters at Martha's Exchange Restaurant and Brewery in Nashua. At the time, Iowa appeared within his reach, but little else did. New Hampshire, South Carolina, and indeed, even the nomination, looked like long-shots.

It was evident Obama had sparked immense excitement. He was drawing rock-concert crowds. He offered hope to legions of disaffected voters who had closed their hearts to politics. But it was hardly clear what it would all amount to.

What Obama had to do, he told reporters that night, was give voters a "permission slip" to vote for him: reassure them about his capacity to lead so that they would recognize his capacity to change. If he could do that, Obama reasoned, he could persuade a skeptical primary electorate to look past more conventional, more experienced candidates and reach for something transformative.

Four months later, Obama has made tremendous headway in granting people that permission, winning Iowa and South Carolina decisively, losing New Hampshire narrowly to Senator Hillary Clinton, and capturing more delegates than her in Nevada. Many voters have made the leap he has asked of them, encouraged by Democratic Party stalwarts whose endorsements bestowed legitimacy on his candidacy. What once seemed like an improbable feat for Obama has crept ever closer.

"Clearly he's established the credibility of that claim with Iowa and South Carolina. I don't think there's any question," said Bill Chaloupka, a professor of political science at Colorado State University. "Now we get to see what happens."

Indeed, the prize remains a distant quarry. Twenty-two states vote in primaries or caucuses on Tuesday, a virtual national primary where Obama's well-funded but insurgent campaign will face its biggest test.

Clinton still leads in most polls and enjoys broader name recognition. The sheer number of states in play renders the candidates' organizations and local appearances - two of Obama's strengths - less relevant. Many undecided Democratic voters will make their decisions Tuesday on broad themes and impressions gleaned from television ads, and from the media.

In this dynamic, the messages from Obama and Clinton will be at their most distilled - he will promise judgment, she will offer experience. One of those values will win out, if not Tuesday then in the months ahead.

Now that it is a two-person race for delegates, Obama and his advisers, believing the anti-Clinton vote is bigger than the Clinton vote, are aggressively targeting supporters of former senator John Edwards, not to mention Edwards himself, whose endorsement Obama and Clinton both covet. Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, told reporters last week that they are confident Clinton's vote had hit its ceiling, and that the undecided vote would break Obama's way.

"As we look at how the rest of those voters are going to get located, we feel very good about their likely direction," Plouffe said.

Obama's advisers have long believed that they did not have to establish Obama as the most experienced candidate on the ballot; they merely had to establish him as experienced enough.

Obama, 46, was asked in an interview with Boston Globe editors in December if there were an experience threshold in running for president.

"Absolutely there is," he said. "And I think I meet it."

Some voters in the early voting states never got over their hesitation about Obama's short Washington tenure - he has been a senator since 2005. But many clearly did. As Obama began to rise in the polls, he remained far behind Clinton when voters were asked who they saw as the most experienced. Voters simply accepted the experience he had.

"His education, his intellect, his vision for the future - I'm very comfortable with it," said Samuel Gilmore, a 65-year-old Albuquerque pastor and a newcomer to politics, one of more than 6,000 people who came to see Obama at a downtown convention center Friday. "I had three strokes last year, but I'm here, cane and all."

Earlier on Friday, Obama, citing his head-to-head debate with Clinton in Los Angeles the previous night, told reporters that he had proven his fluency in the matters of a president.

"I feel like voters who watched last night recognized that I know what I'm talking about," he said. "The issue is not going to be whether or not she has been in the public eye longer. It's going to be who has the vision to take the country forward."

Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, have done their best to stoke fears that Obama is unprepared for the most important job in the world. Hillary Clinton has raised the specter of a terrorist attack testing the next administration. Bill Clinton likened a vote for Obama to a "roll [of] the dice." Prominent Clinton supporters, such as former Los Angeles Lakers star Magic Johnson, have tried to paint Obama as a "rookie."

Obama has fought back by embedding a warning into his anti-Washington rhetoric. Electing him, he argues, is less of a gamble than awarding the presidency to a politician stewed in Beltway thinking.

That message gained particular currency in change-hungry constituencies such as African-American voters in South Carolina.

"We've been in a rut so long," said Willie Washington, a 72-year-old retired furniture salesman who came to see Obama speak in Sumter, S.C., before the South Carolina primary. "Now it's time for us to make a change for our children and our grandchildren."

Obama is also basing his case increasingly on electability, which had long been one of Clinton's watchwords. He argues explicitly that Clinton cannot match his ability to attract new voters, and attract independents and Republicans, a trait he believes will be crucial for Democrats heading into the general election - especially if the Republican nominee is Senator John McCain of Arizona, who enjoys considerable crossover appeal.

"I'm confident I will get her voters if I'm the nominee," Obama said Friday. "It's not clear that she would get the voters I got if she were the nominee."

As he campaigns around the country, Obama usually begins speeches by recounting the day he launched his campaign, almost a year ago on a frigid day in Springfield, Ill. He talks about how far he has come.

The day before South Carolina's primary, Obama's wife, Michelle, reflected on the same thing in an appearance at Voorhees College, a small, historically black school not far from the Georgia border. But her version had an edge.

She expressed frustration at how commentators and Obama's rivals had explained away his successes - his fund-raising dominance, his win in Iowa, his rise in the national polls, and his delegate victory in Nevada.

"The bar is set, they say you can't reach the bar, you don't have the resources to reach the bar. You reach the bar, sometimes you pass over the bar, and then the bar is moved," she said.

But there is really only one bar that Obama is trying to get over, one that has not budged: Winning his party's nod for the presidency over one of the country's toughest and best-known political families. He has come far, but he still has a ways to climb.

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.