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Will Obama take the Race!!

Section: Business

Kyonne Gibson

After 10 consecutive defeats, including a heartbreaker in tailor-made Wisconsin on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton can't win the nomination unless Obama makes a major mistake. Her allies have to reveal something damaging about Obama. Don't count her out quite yet, but Wisconsin revealed deep and destructive fractures in the Clinton coalition. That explains why Clinton's aides accused Obama of plagiarism for delivering a speech that included words that had first been uttered by Deval Patrick, the Massachusetts governor and a friend of Obama. The charge bordered on the hypocritical, Clinton herself has borrowed Obama's lines and by itself was unlikely to have an impact on the race.

Clinton claimed Tuesday that reporters, not her campaign, pushed the plagiarism story line. That is not true.
The Clinton camp hopes to produce other instances of rhetorical theft and show a pattern of bad behavior. The danger for Obama is anything that undercuts his image as a candidate who rises above politics. Something like this might work to Clinton's advantage: Obama is backtracking on a pledge to abide by spending caps in the general election, and his explanation is bogus. Obama is undeniably raw. Less than four years removed from the Illinois Legislature, he stands at the brink of the Democratic nomination and will soon go one-on-one in debates with a tough and savvy former first lady. The odds of a misstep are low but not impossible for these reasons: Clinton will grow increasingly negative; Obama faces more scrutiny as the new front-runner; his performance in multi-candidates debates was uneven; and the charmed Illinois senator has never faced political crises.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap_campaignplus/20080220/ap_ca/on_deadline_wisconsin

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