Obama Shifts to General-Election Mode

WSJ

The Obama campaign appears poised to begin running its general election campaign after Tuesday night’s primaries seemed unlikely to change the math or the momentum in the Democratic nomination.

David Axelrod, the top Obama strategist, told reporters that Barack Obama would compete for the six remaining Democratic contests, where 217 delegates are at stake. But he said that the campaign would soon focus on the general election because likely Republican nominee John McCain had “basically run free for some time now because we’ve been consumed with this.” He added: “I don’t think we’re going to spend time solely in primary states.”

Pressed by reporters whether that meant the campaign would make stops in general election states over the next month, Axelrod said: “You could infer that from what I said.”

The mood aboard the campaign plane was cheerful on Tuesday night, even though the campaign didn’t yet know the final result of the Indiana vote. Campaign advisors said they didn’t expect to win Indiana, but that the numbers may have been in their favor.

“We’re down 39,000 votes,” Axelrod said. “There are somewhere between 120,000 and 185,000 [votes in Lake County]. If we got 60% of them we’d come pretty darn close.”

Axelrod declined to say whether he thought Clinton still had a viable path to the nomination, but he said the path had “certainly dimmed some tonight.”

“The fact that she lost… a large important state by a landslide and she’s struggling to hold in one where she was favored where this whole issue of white working class voters was front and center I think is pretty sobering,” he said.

The strategist also attributed a share of Clinton’s narrow lead in Indiana to Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos,” where the talk show host encouraged Republican listeners to vote for Clinton in the Democratic primary in order to prolong the nomination battle.

“If we come up short, they ought to call a press conference tomorrow and thank Rush Limbaugh for the victory,” he said. “Because there’s no doubt if they do win it’ll be by a margin so narrow that the Limbaugh project will have given them the margin.”

Axelrod also argued that the debate over a three month gas-tax holiday pushed by Clinton, which Obama had heavily criticized in recent days, may have backfired for the New York senator. “People were skeptical. I think this gas tax bit really worked for us,” he said.

One reporter pressed: Why didn’t it work?

The reply was blunt: “Because it was a stupid idea and we said so.”