Over and out, Hillary US elections 08: Obama has outpolled, outmanoeuvred, out-fundraised and out-organised the Clintons, but she never looked a winner http://tinyurl.com/5twqqq The Guardian Niall Stanage It's all over bar the shouting. The most remarkable party nomination battle in a generation, joined four months ago in the snows of Iowa, was brought to a de facto end on a balmy spring day yesterday. Hillary Clinton, five hundred miles away in Indianapolis, told her supporters "It's full speed on to the White House". But even she cannot really believe it. She had gone in to yesterday's contests in North Carolina and Indiana hoping for what she called a "game changer". The game changed alright. But the results were a mirror image of what she had hoped for, propelling Barack Obama tantalisingly close to the finish line. Clinton needed, at a minimum, a landslide in Indiana and a close enough result to claim a moral victory in North Carolina. Instead, Obama crushed her by 14 points in North Carolina, while she had to wait until the early hours of this morning to be declared a skin-of-the-teeth winner in Indiana. Clinton's hopes of running her younger opponent close in the pledged delegate race were slim even before yesterday's contests. They have now been extinguished. But the results were even more devastating because they kicked the legs out from under the arguments she and her aides had been making to Democratic Party superdelegates. The Clintonistas had argued that the sheen had finally come off Obama in recent weeks and that he was fatally flawed as a presidential election candidate. But the Illinois senator proved his resilience, performing much more strongly in Indiana than in the demographically comparable state of Pennsylvania two weeks ago - and this despite the bizarre re-emergence of his controversial former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, in the interim. The Clinton camp had also insisted that Obama was unable to bring together the traditional Democratic coalition, his support among African-Americans allegedly offset by a disastrous weakness among whites. But Obama, even at this supposed low ebb, still won 40% of white votes in Indiana. And if the former first lady's supporters would still claim this to be too poor a showing, there is a rather obvious rebuttal: around 90% of African-Americans in both states yesterday supported Obama. Exactly where does Clinton get the idea that she would be best at weaving together the traditional strands of her party's support when she can persuade only one in ten blacks to back her? The former first lady may well fight on until the primaries end on June 3 - unless, of course, the financial strains that caused her to lend her campaign more than $6 million over the last month force her out before then. But the result - barring some catastrophe of unimaginable scale hitting Obama - is no longer in doubt. Clinton will soon have time to reflect on the reasons why she was vanquished in a contest she was expected to win easily. Much of the blame must lie with her campaign, which took too long to offer a compelling rationale for her candidacy, failed her organisationally (especially in caucus states), and seemed awash in a sense of entitlement that turned voters off. The former first lady was also, truth be told, a candidate with serious weaknesses. Poll after poll showed that even Democrats viewed her as fundamentally less honest than Obama. Her apparent enthusiasm for the dark side of politics - "This is the fun part," she famously said as the campaign turned negative in the run-in to Iowa - rankled. And, covering the campaign, I lost count of the number of times I heard some variation of the comment made to me by Karen Cox, a part-time realtor who showed up to see Michelle Obama speak in Charlotte on the eve of polling. Referring to Clinton, Cox said succinctly, "She lacks authenticity." Yet, parsing the weaknesses of the Clinton campaign only tells half the story of this remarkable election. And it risks blocking out the sheer extraordinariness of Barack Obama's achievement. A man who was toiling in obscurity in the Illinois state legislature four years ago is on the brink of defeating the dynasty that has dominated Democratic politics for almost two decades. He has outpolled, outmanoeuvred, out-fundraised and out-organised the Clintons. But that alone is not what makes Obama special. He has done what the former first lady could never have done: held out the promise of a politics that transcends division, that does not get down in the mud but calls voters to a higher purpose, that strains for decency and even, on occasion, nobility. Clinton promised to play the same old game better than anyone else. Obama said the game itself could be changed. "Don't ever forget that we have a choice in this country," he said at the conclusion of his victory speech in the Reynolds Coliseum here last night. "We can choose not to be divided... we can choose not to be afraid... we can still choose this moment to finally come together and solve the problems we've talked about all those other years and all those other elections. "This time can be different than all the rest." Can it? Time - and a long, punishing general election campaign - will tell. But, last night, it seemed at last that the answer might indeed be: yes, it can. -- 让原本痛苦、僵化的作文课，变成创意纷飞、想像奔驰、文思泉涌的学习乐园 ---培力作文补习班 http://www.empower.idv.tw/ --

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