Obama takes Badger State easily; McCain coasts, too

Add comment February 19th, 2008

I was telling colleagues around the newsroom today (Tuesday) that I believed the Wisconsin primary would be close between Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I was wrong. Obama won a blowout victory, about 58 to 41 percent with 84 percent of the vote counted.  On the GOP side, John McCain scored a less impressive victory over Mike Huckabee, but my suspicion is that some Republicans slipped over to the Democratic column and voted in that primary, because McCain is the all-but-certain Republican nominee.

The next two weeks will be a time of increasingly negative campaigning by the Clinton campaign, but I’m not sure it will work very well.  Obama can always go negative, too. He can point out how Hillary, appointed universal health care czar by Bill Clinton in 1993, failed miserably and still hasn’t told us who those 500 people were on her health care task force.

I watched Obama’s victory speech, which draggedon for 45 minutes. He basically gave his standard stump speech with more details — obviously to address critics who say his speeches lack specifics. And as I said in my Tuesday column,

Both Democrats essentially share the same platform of more government solutions to domestic problems. Majorities in recent decades have rejected the liberal approach, but the electorate may be turning after a decade or more of runaway capitalism — aided and abetted by Republicans — which has literally taken American jobs and ran away with them to China, Singapore and India.