Before likely second blow, Clinton plots next battles

[Ron Burgundy]

AFP - Braced for a second painful rejection Tuesday in the White House race, Hillary Clinton is seeking fresh battlefields on which to blunt Barack Obama's surge.

Should Clinton collapse to a hefty defeat in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, as some polls suggest, she will face, and likely ignore, calls to abandon her quest, to clear the way for a new Democratic champion.

New Hampshire was supposed to have been the 'firewall' where Clinton would thwart Obama's accelerating momentum, in the state which made her husband Bill the 'Comeback Kid" in his 1992 White House bid.

But instead, Obama, a 46-year-old senator who is America's hottest political property, is threatening to repeat his triumph in last week's Iowa caucuses.

Clinton previewed an intensified attack on Obama on Monday, drawing sharp new contrasts between his inspirational rhetoric and theme of hope and what she portrayed as the flip-flops and inconsistencies of just another politician.

Voice thick with sarcasm, she accused Obama of inflating a thin resume by comparing himself to Democratic icon John F. Kennedy, and civil rights icon Martin Luther King, "two of our greatest heroes."

"Martin Luther King led a movement ... he was beaten, he was jailed, and he gave a speech that was one of the most beautiful, profound speeches ever delivered in America."

"President Kennedy was in the Congress for fourteen years, he was a war hero, he was a man of great accomplishment," Clinton said.

Clinton aides say the former first lady, whose campaign has been criticized as a relic of the past compared to Obama's lofty calls for a hopeful future, will continue to draw blunt contrasts between his rhetoric and "reality."

"One state has spoken. Now the other 49 states will have their say," said Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson in a statement carried by the Politico website.

Clinton's campaign never coped with the acceleration in Obama's election machine in New Hampshire, with the primary following just five days after his Iowa triumph.

But now it has several weeks to regroup, a window which it can use to subject Obama to a barrage of attacks and political advertising, hoping to pressure him into a mistake, playing on her claims he is inexperienced.

"Two weeks is a lot more than five days, it will give time for her message to penetrate," said Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Fordham University, New York.

The next battlefield for the Clinton administration is the western state of Nevada, which holds caucuses on January 19, and where the first lady's 20 point opinion poll lead offers hope of changing Obama's victory narrative.

Then comes South Carolina, on January 26, where Obama and Clinton have been in a close-fought battle for months.

But since around 50 percent of the state's Democratic voters are African American, many of those voters are expected to switch from Clinton to Obama, once they see him as a black candidate with a real chance of the nomination.

That leaves the clutch of more than 20 states voting on Super Tuesday, February 5, including her homebase of New York, California, Illinois and Arkansas, and the campaign said Monday she had money to compete in all of them.

In many of those states, Clinton currently has healthy opinion poll leads, but signs of trouble emerged Monday, as a new national poll found a lead that was commanding only a month ago, had gushed away.

The USA/Today Gallup poll of likely Democratic voters had her tied with Obama on 33 percent each. The former first lady had an 18-point lead in mid-December.

The unanswered question about Clinton's campaign has always been whether her massive national leads and formidable position in key states could withstand a loss in early voting states like New Hampshire and Iowa.

source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080108/ts_alt_afp/usvote2008clintonfuture [link]