It took Barack Obama two victories - the Wyoming caucuses on Saturday and the Mississippi primary on Tuesday - to wipe out the small gain in delegates that Hillary Clinton reaped when she beat him in the Ohio, Rhode Island, and Texas primaries on March 4.
Obama won 19 of the 33 delegates at stake Tuesday, according to the Associated Press tally, which gives him an overall lead, including superdelegates, of 111.
Clinton, however, eliminated Obama's gain from Mississippi when she picked up five delegates yesterday based on final results from the New York primary and the Colorado caucuses, both held Feb. 5.
As Obama and Clinton look toward Pennsylvania's primary on April 22, their campaigns are increasingly focused on how to resolve the impasse over Michigan and Florida, whose delegates the Democratic National Committee stripped after the two states held January primaries against party rules.
The Clinton campaign, believing Michigan and Florida are favorable to its candidate, wants her wins in January to count, or for there to be re-do primaries. "I don't see any other solutions that are fair and honor the commitment that 2.5 million voters made in the Democratic primaries in those two states," Clinton said yesterday.
The Obama campaign says it will not accept the two January results because Obama was not on the ballot in Michigan and did not campaign in Florida. His aides have signaled that they prefer an allocation of the delegates based on some other formula.
Florida Democrats said yesterday they plan to propose a vote-by-mail presidential primary despite objections from members of the state's congressional delegation to a do-over vote. State Senate Democratic leader Steve Geller said the party hopes to have a proposal ready by today that would allow a 30-day review period and a vote by the party's executive committee April 12 on whether to hold the election. A likely deadline for mail-in ballots to be returned would be June 3.
But in a conference call yesterday, Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, expressed deep reservations about the vote-by-mail plan in Florida. He was noncommittal about what solution the campaign would accept.
"My bottom line is, I do want to make sure that the Florida and Michigan delegations have an opportunity to participate in the convention," Obama said. "And we want to figure out an equitable way to do that."
Plouffe also downplayed the importance of Pennsylvania, where polls show Clinton with a wide lead, and emphasized the other contests to come. "We don't cherry-pick states," he said. "We view this as a whole body of states and a whole body of delegates."
The Clinton campaign, in its own memo, said that "the path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue goes through Pennsylvania," played up her wins in bigger states, and asserted that Obama's campaign is in a "downward spiral."
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Clinton voices support for Spitzer's family
WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton sounded a short, sympathetic note yesterday for Eliot Spitzer, the New York governor embroiled in a prostitution scandal, saying she is thinking of his family.
"I'm deeply saddened by this turn of events and my thoughts are with Governor Spitzer's family during this painful time," Clinton said in a statement.
When Spitzer steps down Monday, Clinton will lose one of her superdelegates. Spitzer, like the rest of New York's Democratic Party establishment, had been an outspoken booster of Clinton.
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