Hillary Clinton Campaign in Big Trouble

Obama now has the outright lead:

Sen. Barack Obama took the lead in the race for Democratic delegates for the first time Tuesday, moving ahead of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

[...]Obama won at least 65 delegates in Tuesday's primaries, with 70 still to be awarded. Clinton won at least 33.

Obama won 52 of Washington state's 78 delegates, according to caucus results released by the state party Tuesday night. Clinton won 26.

In the overall race for the nomination, Obama had 1,223, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates. Clinton had 1,198.

It will take 2,025 delegates to secure the Democratic nomination.

He is cutting into her base. She has no more excuses:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has set up Texas and Ohio as her firewall, but the results from Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama's most recent victories give her plenty of reason to worry whether it will hold up.

Obama won sweeping victories in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia on Tuesday, cutting into her lead among her most reliable base voters and adding to a glut of bad news for Clinton. Combine the shake-up of her senior campaign staff, the candidate's $5 million loan to keep her campaign afloat, her eight straight losses in the past week and there's not much that makes Clinton look like a winning candidate. That's counting the prospect of more losses next week in Obama's native Hawaii and in Wisconsin, next door to the Illinois senator's adopted state.

[...]her strategy is reminiscent of another New Yorker who once was a front-runner for the 2008 presidential nomination. Republican Rudy Giuliani also argued he could survive a month of losses and then come back in Florida, but by the time that vote came all the momentum had shifted away from him.

Clinton has been confident about her chances in Texas and Ohio next month because they fit her pattern of victory — they are primary states where she has the support of leading elected officials. Many of the voters in those states are from her base — older or lower income or white or Hispanic or, of course, women.

But exit surveys conducted for The Associated Press and the television networks during Obama's overwhelming victories Tuesday showed she can't rely on those groups any more.

Clinton's campaign can't explain Obama's win as a black thing, since most of the voters in the two states are white. The two split the white vote in Virginia evenly, while Clinton won with that group in Maryland by 10 percentage points. Before Tuesday, Clinton had clearly defeated Obama among whites in all but three states with Democratic primaries, and had a 14 percentage point advantage with white voters in those prior contests combined.

She can't object to the process being a caucus instead of a more representative primary. All three contests were primaries, and he won all three by more than 20 percentage points.

He's even winning older voters. That's really bad news for Billary:

Older voters had been solidly in Hillary Clinton's camp in nearly every primary contest to date.

But according to exit polls out of both Virginia and Maryland, the New York senator lost those voters to Barack Obama in Tuesday’s primaries.

Among voters over 60, Obama beat Clinton by 8 points in Virginia and 4 points in Maryland.

And she is a sore loser:

For the second election night in a row, Hillary Clinton failed to acknowledge or congratulate Barack Obama after he won the day in dominating fashion.

On Tuesday in El Paso, hours after Virginia had been called for Obama, she stuck to her “Texas campaign kickoff” message and did not stray from an energetic, Lone Star-themed stump speech. She did mention Obama by name, only to chide his health care plan.

On Saturday night in Richmond, Virginia, Clinton spoke to a crowd of thousands at the state’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner, but she ignored Obama’s quartet of blowout primary and caucus wins that day as well (Obama also won the Maine caucuses the next day).

The courtesy of conceding a primary or caucus loss — and then congratulating your opponent — is by no means required. But it has become standard practice during campaign season.