Barrack Obama Wins Missouri!

Barrack Obama won in Missouri
“There is one thing on this February night that we do not need the final results to know,” Obama said at a raucous rally in Chicago. “Our time has come. Our movement is real. And change is coming to America.”

Both candidates won their home states. Clinton claimed contested races in New Jersey and Massachusetts but saw her northeastern streak broken when Obama won Connecticut. The two split the southern states, with Obama winning Alabama and Georgia — both of which have considerable black populations — and Clinton victorious in Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Arizona. Early this morning, Clinton and Obama were running neck and neck in the returns from the New Mexico caucuses.

Obama’s strength in the Midwest — particularly in states that held caucuses — became clear as the night wore on as the freshman Illinois senator won a come-from-behind victory in Missouri as well as caucuses in Minnesota, North Dakota, Kansas, Idaho and Colorado. He also scored a victory in Delaware — the home state of his campaign manager, David Plouffe, and communications director, Dan Pfeiffer.

Because of the proportional manner in which Democrats award delegates, what was once expected to be the final day of the primary and caucus races was cast by both campaigns as simply a big battle in a larger war that could well extend into April and perhaps all the way to the Democratic National Convention in Denver late this summer.

Clinton’s campaign hailed her victory in Massachusetts as “the upset of the night” in light of the high-profile endorsements Obama received last week from Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Obama’s campaign insisted that the Illinois Democrat had impressively closed the gap with Clinton in the Bay State in recent weeks and that his apparent narrow loss was a sign of strength, not weakness.

Race became a major issue in the days leading up to South Carolina’s contest last month. The Clinton and Obama campaigns traded charges and countercharges about which side was injecting race into the contest. Cooler heads prevailed as a number of neutral observers intervened, but the back-and-forth had significant ramifications.

Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, the most prominent African American elected official in South Carolina, publicly chastised former President Bill Clinton for his attacks on Obama, and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) groused privately about the former president’s tactics and went on to endorse Obama.

Obama has resisted putting his race front and center in the campaign in much the same way Senator Clinton has said she is not running as a woman for president but rather running for president as a woman. Still, the historic nature of the choice — either Clinton or Obama would the represent a first — has drawn massive amounts of attention and money to the nomination fight.

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