Hillary and the Giuliani Strategy

Barack Obama is surging, and Hillary Clinton is losing ground fast. So she has decided to employ the same strategy, or let me correct myself, disastrous strategy, of Rudy Giuliani. She is going to sit back, bide her time and let Barack Obama sweep through everything that isn't Texas and Ohio.

This is dangerous, and as we found with Rudy, prone to failure. If you let the other candidate grab all of the momentum the way Hillary is right now, and as Rudy did in the months leading up to Florida, you run the risk of getting run right out of the national landscape. When you run out of the delegate counts for long enough, and your opponent gets to make flowery victory speeches with thousands of cheering supporters while you justify the losses by saying tomorrow will count more, it can really kill the positive news stories, which every candidate needs as much as anything else. Rudy became a non-factor in the Republican race, as he let Romney, Huckabee and McCain steal his thunder, leaving him with nothing when the chips were actually counted.

Obama is about to win two more primaries this coming week, in Wisconsin and Hawaii, as he has pulled ahead in the polls, just as he's pulled ahead in the polls in the last month. He is rising, and the more time Hillary lets him build and build, the brighter his star is going to shine. When Texas and Ohio do roll around, on March 4, where she is currently leading, and where there are more blue collar and Latino voters (with whom Hillary has done very well) she could very well pull ahead in the delegate count, even if Obama seems like a surefire candidate by that time.

Barack did do very well winning over Latinos and blue collar workers in the primaries he won in Virginia, Maryland and D.C., so maybe this is a beginning towards winning over those voters, as well as everyone else that is already sliding to him. Hillary has managed to maintain her lead in the Latino, blue collar and women voters so far, but this could be the beginning of the end of that as well.

An endorsement by John Edwards for either of these two, likely Obama, if anyone, would mean a huge swell of support among blue collar voters, as Edwards would have been their man had he still been in the race. Obviously it's not a dead-set correlation that what Edwards says, people will do, but if they respect him enough to have wanted to vote for him, they will respect his opinion, and a good chunk of them could slide over to Obama, giving him the rise in Texas and Ohio that he needs to break this election wide open.

February is going to be interesting, and I think this strategy of Hillary's...frankly, its going to fail, and when political science classes look over this election in the future, as they will, its groundbreaking in so many different ways, they will see this strategy near the end of the Democratic nominations as one of the greatest political miscalculations in history.

Count on it.