Jonathan Alter on Obama 08 Strategy

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter points out how Barack Obama could radically alter (no pun intended) the 08 primary dynamic and strategy that had, up until now, seemed etched in stone. Excerpt from Alter's post is below:

"Hillary's game plan is to raise enough money and generate enough momentum to survive a loss in Iowa (perhaps to John Edwards, who is well-organized there) or New Hampshire (to the flavor of the moment), but then secure the nomination by running the table on Super Tuesday. The reason she thought she could do that is that Super Tuesday primaries in the Democratic Party are dominated by African-American voters, who generally love the Clintons. But there's someone they would love even more, namely a certain senator from Illinois.

To make matters even tougher for any other Democrat, an Obama adviser told me that if he runs, he would launch a huge voter registration drive in the South. The aim would be to so expand black registration that Southern states would no longer be gimmees for the GOP. At a minimum, it would pin down Republicans defending their base in the South. The little-known clincher is that Obama has personal experience in voter registration. Before entering the state Senate in 1996, he ran a registration drive that registered more than 100,000 new black voters in Chicago alone.

No wonder that when I saw Obama at an off-the-record book party on New York's East Side last week, the crowd included several of Hillary's biggest backers. They know this thing is changing fast."

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