Political Snapshot

Obama’s got a confident new strategy

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

(Via Los Angeles Times.)

Barack Obama hasn’t managed after months of political combat to force Hillary Rodham Clinton out of the presidential race, so he’s about to try another approach: ignoring her.

Confident that he has built a near-impregnable lead, his campaign aides said Wednesday that Obama would begin shifting his focus toward the general election.

Obama still plans to campaign in states that remain on the primary calendar — he is to appear in Oregon over the weekend — but he may also start showing up in states that are considered important in the November contest: Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. (All three have held their Democratic primaries.)

With Clinton’s hopes of capturing the Democratic nomination dimming, Obama needs to prepare for the prospect of a general election matchup with the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, aides said.

“Everyone is eager to get on with this,” said David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s lead strategist.

“We’ve got to multi-task here . . . Sen. McCain has basically run free for some time now,” Axelrod added.

Clinton’s campaign cast Obama’s strategy as a show of hubris. Clinton has given no signal she is dropping out of the race after Tuesday’s split results, when she lost decisively in North Carolina and won narrowly in Indiana.

Showing she still believes she can win, the New York senator hastily arranged a campaign stop Wednesday in West Virginia, which will hold its primary Tuesday. “We’ve seen the perils of saying ‘mission accomplished’ too early,” said Phil Singer, a Clinton campaign spokesman.

The phrase “mission accomplished” was famously displayed on an aircraft carrier in 2003, when President Bush came aboard and declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended.

Full story here.