Analysis: Obama gets back to basic strengths

By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff
News Analysis

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama received a fresh jolt of energy for his beleaguered presidential campaign from the same part of the country that established him as the Democratic frontrunner.

His solid victory in the North Carolina primary - combined with a close finish against Hillary Clinton in Indiana - helped him blunt the impact of Clinton's recent wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania and overcome the first serious misstep of his campaign.

''The size of Obama's margin in North Carolina speaks to his ability to put behind him the controversy over [his former pastor] Rev. Jeremiah Wright, at least for the primaries,'' said Wayne Lesperance, a political scientist at New England College in Henniker, N.H., as the results came in. ''Right now, it looks like they split the states, but the overall margin goes to Obama.''

For Obama, North Carolina gave him a chance to re-create the electoral coalition that made him a political force in the first place.

The states of the Eastern Seaboard lack the easy regional identity of the liberal Northeast or the Deep South or the independent West, but they combine all those elements in a way that fits Obama's political demographics to perfection: a broad coalition combining large black populations, upscale white high-tech workers, religious rural voters, and idealistic college students.

It was in South Carolina that Obama won his first landslide, delivering a blow from which Hillary - and Bill - Clinton have yet to recover.

It was in the ''Potomac primary'' on Feb. 12 that Obama opened his first clear lead in delegates, with big wins in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

And North Carolina delivered one of his most-needed triumphs, one that could put new pressure on Clinton to drop out of the race.

Lesperance, for one, believes that a narrow Clinton win in Indiana - where she was leading for most of the night - may be enough to keep her campaign running down the stretch. But her hope to build momentum with either a surprisingly large triumph in the Hoosier state or significant inroads into Obama country in North Carolina did not come to pass.

''I suspect over the next few days there will be a strong push by the Obama campaign to get 20 or more superdelegates'' - the party leaders who will provide the decisive margin for either candidate - ''and really try to wrap things up,'' Lesperance said.

Obama's victory in North Carolina was narrower than his wins in the other Eastern Seaboard states, reflecting some of the erosion of white support that he experienced in Ohio and Pennsylvania; but it was a big enough margin - about 180,000 votes by mid-evening - to dash Clinton's chances of winning the national popular vote without including Michigan, where Obama was not on the ballot.

Even some of Clinton's diehard supporters have said she would be unable to win over enough of the roughly 280 remaining undeclared superdelegates unless she was able to claim a popular mandate.

In recent weeks, Clinton has banked on the idea that a strong finish would persuade the party that she was better-prepared to take on Republican John McCain; her victory in Pennsylvania two weeks ago gave her a boost, followed immediately by a renewed controversy surrounding Wright, whose sermons blaming the United States government for the AIDS epidemic and the 9/11 attacks had caused a furor back in March.

At the time, Obama rejected the statements but refused to distance himself from Wright, calling him a good man and a patriot. Last week, Obama's judgment came under question when Wright took to the airwaves to issue a staunch defense of his sermons and to portray Obama as an opportunistic politician.

A clearly angry Obama repudiated Wright, but Obama's poll numbers plunged. In North Carolina, a double-digit lead for Obama shrunk to single digits overnight.

But with solid and enthusiastic support from black voters, who constituted a third of the total electorate in North Carolina, and big victories in the upscale ''research triangle'' near Raleigh and Durham, Obama prevailed easily.

It may be enough to help him secure his party's nomination and perhaps the presidency - if only the rest of the country would come together for him as cooperatively as the states of the Eastern Seaboard.