Ticket Replay: Obama wants to be president of all 57 states

During the next couple of weeks The Ticket is occasionally republishing some of our favorite items from this incredible 2007-08 political season. This item originally appeared May 9, 2008:

Ah, Oregon. The beautiful Northwest. Rain. Trees. Clouds. Rain. Friendly territory for Sen. Barack Obama, the leading contender for the Democratic Party's long-disputed presidential nomination.

So there he was in Beaverton today at the start of a two-day swing through Oregon, virtually ignoring his remaining Democratic opponent, what's-her-name from New York, as part of his new strategy to act like the actual nominee while she flails around way behind in numbers.

Naturally, this being the Northwest where everything is not ruined quite yet, his staff had Obama visit an eco-friendly company, Vernier Software & Technology, that makes products for science teachers. He could get education in there too, see?

In his prepared remarks Obama was ready to start blasting Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, to show the Illinois Democrat is moving on to the general election campaign.

But first the freshman senator had to go through all the....

Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States

(UPDATE: Complete text of Pres.-elect Barack Obama's acceptance speech is available here.)

As expected, the moment the polls closed in California, Oregon and Washington state, network projections declared that Barack Obama would win all three.

And with those three, based on such calls, the senator from Illinois passed the 270-electoral-vote mark needed to win the presidency.

Not only will he be the nation's first biracial president, he also will be the first native of Hawaii to move into the White House.

He is the first sitting senator to claim the ultimate political prize since John Kennedy in 1960 (as would have been John McCain).

There is one trend that continues -- Obama will be the fourth straight president with an Ivy League educational pedigree.

-- Don Frederick 

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Battleground bucks favoring Barack Obama over John McCain

With Barack Obama on vacation and John McCain maintaining a schedule light on generating news, we decided to poke around at the Open Secrets site, to see where the money is going from donors in likely battleground states.

Advantage: Obama.

Now we realize where the donations come from does NOT mean that the votes will follow. But it's still interesting to take the measure of it. Below is The Times' interactive map of states, with the battleground states defined as those in which the margin of 2004 victory was less than 8 percentage points.

Now we go over to Open Secrets and look at its tables of states and political contributions. For the purposes of these tables, we're leaving out the withdrawn candidates. And the totals include primaries, which skews the results a bit for Obama since the Democratic fight was more protracted than the Republican fight. But it's still interesting to mull.

                                                                                                                                       

State	McCain raised	Obama raised	advantage
Colorado	$1,791,828	$3,386,366	Obama
Delaware	208,016	230,955	Obama
Florida	9,793,200	8,092,536	McCain
Iowa	254,430	644,961	Obama
Michigan	2,942,741	2,467,003	McCain
Minnesota	1,215,608	1,786,394	Obama
Missouri	1,359,332	1,988,004	Obama
Nevada	1,147,931	751,545	McCain
New Hampshire	538,505	945,474	Obama
New Jersey	2,990,941	4,727,378	Obama
New Mexico	319,863	1,192,070	Obama
Ohio	1,866,001	2,134,689	Obama
Oregon	650,964	1,813,428	Obama
Pennsylvania	2,575,068	4,942,149	Obama
Washington	1,317,906	4,995,383	Obama
Wisconsin	831,661	1,378,850	Obama

-- Scott Martelle

Barack Obama ad targets include some shockers

Much attention, understandably, is being paid to the notes Barack Obama sounds in his first general election television ad, which starts running Friday and can be viewed here.

Its emphasis on family values, self reliance and patriotism would have made Ronald Reagan's media shop proud. And in case anyone misses the point, the spot's title -- "Country I Love" -- says it all.

What really grabs us, however, is where the ad will appear (and, in one case, where it won't).

For the most part, the 18-state list is predictable. It includes the battlegrounds, large and small, that political analysts expect to watch through election day: Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, New Hampshire and New Mexico among them.

But the list also includes a handful of reliably Republican places where Obama aides have been saying they believe he can compete, based on strength he showed among certain voting blocs during the primary season.

The states in this category are Georgia, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina and Virginia.

And then there are two states -- Alaska and North Dakota -- where the airing of the Obama ad demonstrates that:

A) His campaign knows something about these GOP redoubts that the rest of us doesn't;

B) When you're riding herd over an organization that raises massive amounts of cash seemingly without breaking a sweat -- and just today announced it was breaking free of the restraints imposed by the campaign finance system, as our friends at The Swamp write about here -- you can afford to take a flier on a couple of longshots, especially when the media markets are inexpensive;

C) It's always fun, when the November election still seems a long way off, to play in a few of your rival's backyards, if for no other reason than to cause some headaches on the other side.

Probably some combination of A, B and C explains the decision to advertise in Alaska (which President Bush carried with 61% of the vote in 2004) and North Dakota (which Bush won with 63% of the vote four years ago).

Looking at all seven states where the Obama ad buy raises eyebrows, here are some of the daunting historical facts ...

Top of the Ticket, the start of Year Two

On this, the first anniversary of our Top of the Ticket blog, we are reminded of the mercurial, unpredictable nature of U.S. politics -- part of what makes what we do so fascinating.

Our goal -- one of us on the East Coast and the other on the far more important or at least less humid West Coast -- was to write about Campaign '08 virtually around the clock.

Our second-ever posting, 12 months ago today, previewed an upcoming L.A. Times/Bloomberg Poll; later in the day, we detailed the results of the nationwide survey. The findings were in line with other polls of the time.

In the Republican presidential race, which then seemed the most likely to last deep into the primary season, Rudy Giuliani was perched in first place. His lead wasn't overwhelming, but it was strong enough that he appeared certain to remain a major contender.

His liberal record on social issues loomed as an obvious liability within his party, but his tough-on-terrorism message was attracting substantial support from moderates and GOP-leaning independents.

His major headache among rivals last June was an as-yet-undeclared candidate who was riding a wave as the great conservative hope -- Fred Thompson. He ran a strong second in the poll.

Lagging far behind were John McCain and Mitt Romney, each barely with double-digit support. In our preview posting, we were especially scornful of McCain, noting sarcastically (and foolishly, as it turned out) that in the poll, he found himself "in heated competition with the 'Don't Know' category."

Meriting no mention from us was Mike Huckabee, one of several back-of-the-pack candidates barely earning any support across the country.

The Democratic race, at that point, seemed so much more cut-and-dried.

Hillary Clinton was the clear front-runner; Barack Obama was just as clearly ...

Breaking News: Hillary Clinton now thinks Karl Rove's a political genius

Until very recently -- like suddenly this afternoon -- Karl Rove was to most Democrats the Great Satan, the political mastermind of two outrageously stunning Republican presidential victories by a Texas goofball governor and, before that, the unfortunate upset ousting of a popular Democratic governor named Ann Richards, as well as the overall rejuvenation of the Lone Star state GOP in statewide offices.

In fact, there are few things politically evil that Rove has not been blamed for by Democrats, even nine months after he exited the White House to write a book, consult and opine in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and as an analyst for Fox News.

In recent months one of the worst things Sen. Hillary Clinton could say about her chief opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, was that he was taking moves out of the "Karl Rove playbook." Can you imagine?! "Shame on you, Barack Obama!" she said. Which, if you stop to think about it, means Obama was being successful.

So successful, in fact, that the Illinois freshman senator, ahead in delegates and popular votes, is on the brink of snatching the party's nomination and even acting like the presumptive nominee, ignoring Clinton and taking on who's-its from Arizona.

For his part, a year ago Rove was saying Clinton was the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination and then, later, he said she was a tremendously flawed candidate with extremely high negatives for a national candidate. Both true at the time.

How quickly things change in this season's presidential politics.

Today, Clinton began citing Rove as the ultimate expert on who was the strongest Democratic candidate in the Nov. 4 general. And we've got the exclusive maps below to prove it, all four confidential pages.

No, really!

Campaigning in Kentucky today for tomorrow's....

What if Hillary Clinton had treated Iowa like Barack Obama has Ky. and W. Va.?

Barack Obama ultimately disrespected Kentucky even more than he did West Virginia; he at least made an 11th-hour stop (albeit a brief one) in the latter state the day before its presidential primary last Tuesday.

In the walk-up to Kentucky's nomination contest this Tuesday, the closest he's come to its borders was when he was at home in Chicago on Thursday.**

Since then, he's gone off to South Dakota, Oregon (which also has a primary Tuesday, and where he was greeted by a massive crowd, at left, on Sunday) and Montana (June 3). Tuesday night will find him in Iowa -- not only the site of the caucus win that first fueled his candidacy, but a likely key swing state come November.

Obama's hands-off approach to West Virginia and Kentucky is striking to us on two counts.

One, public protestations notwithstanding, his willingness to concede them to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic race is an unmistakable signal that as he and his aides look toward the general election, neither state figures in its Electoral College calculations. (They are not alone in this assumption -- an astute overlook of the electoral map posted on Salon.com late last week by Democratic pollster Paul Maslin did not include either on the list of 17 states he views as competitive, to varying degrees, in an Obama-John McCain match-up.)

Secondly, it caused us to hark back to the very early stages of the campaign and wonder: What if Clinton had followed the controversial advice of her then-deputy campaign manager, Mike Henry, and taken a pass on a full-fledged effort to win the Jan. 3 caucuses in Iowa?

It was almost exactly a year ago -- May 21 -- that Henry (who left the campaign shortly after Campaign Manager Patti Solis Doyle was replaced early this year) wrote an in-house memo ...

Can new Chairman Hillary-style poster turn the race for Clinton?

Just in time for next week's Kentucky and Oregon Democratic primaries -- what do you want to bet they each win one? -- the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton has a new poster to play with.

Who could quit with this hanging around?

It's heroic, don't you think? Chairman Hillary. Like what's-his-name, the little guy with the crew cut who runs North Korea, and his dead father who had that immense goiter that everyone pretended not to see to avoid execution. Their grand portraits like this are everywhere, usually several stories tall.

We can see these everywhere. And you can read more about them in an entertaining piece by James Oliphant right here.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Ignoring McCain and Obama, Hillary Clinton slogs on in Oregon

Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton. The name sounds so familiar, doesn't it?

But unless you're in Oregon these days, you don't hear much about her. As the Illinois Democratic senator and the Arizona Republican senator go after each other in international spats as if the general election was already underway, the trailing New York senator tries to make her publicity marks with attacks on President Bush, who's far away, not really listening.

The Swamp's Jim Tankersley has today's Clinton campaign story here.

-- Andrew Malcolm 

Barack Obama confronts the all-important tattoo question

From the no-question-gets-unasked department:

While he was blowing off West Virginia (and paying the price for that on Tuesday), Barack Obama spent several recent days campaigning in Oregon (where the May 20 primary now looms as his latest must-win). As part of his foray into the state, he made time for a brief chat with Portland's alternative newspaper, the Willamette Week.

The session wrapped up with this query:

Question: "If you had a tattoo, what would it be and where would you put it?"

Obama: "Uh, I cannot imagine any circumstances in which I would get a tattoo."

The candidate then allowed that if placed under gunpoint, "then I suppose I’d have to have [my wife] Michelle’s name tattooed somewhere very discreet."

The rest of the interview, which covered more conventional ground, can be read here.

-- Don Frederick