Texas

This week the presidential campaigns got a week off from facing voters, but that doesn't actually mean they had the week off. On any campaign there are two commodities, time and money; and at this stage in the game neither is more valuable than the other.

On the money front, both campaigns on the Democratic side are seemingly healthy. Senator Obama is touting that he has over one million contributors and Senator Clinton is raising a million dollars a day online. With that sort of support, both campaigns will have no problem getting through next Tuesday's contests in Texas, Ohio, and don't forget Vermont and Little Rhody. (Of course, depending on their spending, you never know what the bank account will look like after Tuesday, but I digress.)

What is clear is that with 444 delegates up for grabs, the most important commodity in the next week will be time. Politically, culturally and most importantly geographically, Texas and Ohio aren't close to each other. So the campaigns will have to shift gears and make important decisions about scheduling. The use of surrogates and volunteers becomes increasingly important, and when it comes to surrogates, Senator Clinton seems to have the greatest surrogate of all, Former President William Jefferson Clinton Madeleine Albright. Senator Obama has been making a pitch for volunteers to come to Ohio to help narrow the gap for him there.

Since the last primaries in Wisconsin and Hawaii, Senator Clinton has held events in Texas and Ohio six times each; Senator Obama has had eight events in Texas and six in Ohio. Along the way Senator Clinton made money stops in Boston, New York, Washington, DC and New Orleans.

Going further, a deeper look at the campaign schedules shows the importance each candidate is putting on each state:

Senator Obama began his day in Ohio with a rally in Columbus at 8:30am before he jetted off to Texas for an event in San Marcos this afternoon. Senator Clinton is spending the day in Ohio while her husband is headlining events in Texas. Tomorrow, Senator Clinton will begin her day in Ohio with a town hall meeting in the southern Ohio town of Hanging Rock before winging her way to Houston for the weekend. Senator Obama will stay in Texas tomorrow, but his schedule through the weekend is still undisclosed. According to recent campaign emails, Senator Obama is planning on heavy volunteer turnout this weekend in Ohio, soliciting volunteers to make a charge on Ohio like the birthplace of avaiation's native son Jack Nicklaus did at the 1986 Masters.

According to my poll in Ohio (with a sample size of 9), Barack Obama will win Ohio with 75% of the vote. Voters with the last name of Gray from Warren, OH are breaking entirely for Senator Obama which should push him over the edge in the Buckeye state.

If both candidates are still standing after Tuesday's primaries, their focus will shift to the Wyoming Democratic Caucus meetings on the 8th and the Mississippi primary on the 11th. Then comes my beloved Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which will be the next contest held on April 22nd.

According to recent polls, Barack Obama is looking more like the Rolling Stones and Hillary Clinton is trending more Hootie and the Blowfish. Not following? Well with a growing lead in the polls and delegate counts, time is definitely on Senator Obama's side ("Time Is On My Side", The Rolling Stones, 1965) and Hillary Clinton is asking "Time, why you punish me?" ("Time", Hootie and the Blowfish, 1993).

Some am thoughts at this exciting time:

Picking a Democratic Nominee - I may be niave, but somehow I think the current process will end up picking a nominee without the Democratic Party having to do extrarordinary things. If one candidate emerges by mid-March as stronger than the other, the pressure on the weaker one to get out will be so great that the race could just end. The Superdelegates will begin to break towards the stronger one, ratifying the will of the voters. A deal with be struck to seat Florida and Michigan. Markos proposes a 50/50 split - not a bad idea. But we agree with Bob Kerrey these states should not have a voice in picking the nominee, and that the rules are the rules. In this year of all years - when we've seen unprecedented citizen involvement in politics - it is critical that the Party of the People not once again become the Party of the Smoke Filled Room.

For more on the history of how Democrats ended up with this crazy system read the Post's Ruth Marcus's excellent overview.

But of course this puts all eyes on the March 4th states of Ohio and Texas. If Obama wins both these states, or perhaps even one of them, I think he will win the nomination. If that night somehow Hillary ends up winning the night, either by winning one and drawing in another or winning both, she could be back in this thing. This next period - with 2 debates - Wisconsin. Ohio and Texas is for all the marbles. And with Clinton holding large leads in both the big March 4th states, the drama is can Barack - with his financial edge and the power of his personal appearances - catch up? For those of political junkies, the upcoming rallies, speeches and debates are going to be must sees CSpaners as both Obama and Clinton understand the make or break importance of these critical states and will giving it their all.

The Hispanic Vote so far - If you haven't read it, check out NDN's new study on the Hispanic Vote in 2008. It has some dramatic results, and all sorts of bad news for John McCain and the GOP. If you want to see the study's author in person, come to our event this Wed in DC featuring Joe Trippi, Amy Walter of Hotline and Andres Ramirez, the director of Hispanic Programs at NDN.

Will McCain quit the Senate? - Josh Marshall has been asking the question. I think McCain will quit the Senate and run his campaign from Arizona, right in the middle of the hugely important swing region of the Southwest. For McCain being in DC will complicate his life and make it even less likely he wins. The Democrats will use the Senate to tie him down, interrupt his fundraisers, make him take tough votes. He will have to work much more closely with the very failed Washington GOP, which has given him a recession, a declining middle class, the worst foreign policy mistake in American history, unprecedented levels of corruption and cronyism, and no progress on key issues like climate change, health care and immigration. The more tied McCain is to this era of American history the less likely he is to win, and my guess is that by mid-March he will be trailing the Democratic frontrunner by high single digits or more. So he will have to go, to change the dynamic of what may very wll be a losing campaign. And besides Arizona is a good place to retire to.

The interesting question is if McCain quits the Senate what will Barack do? Running for President from Washington is no easy thing, particularly in this year of "change."

McCain, Hispanics and Immigration - I've gotten questions from the press this week about McCain and immigration, suggesting that given his leadership on immigration reform won't he be able to get back to Bush numbers with Hispanics, and put the heavily Hispanic swing states - AZ, CO, FL, NM and NV - out of play for the Democrats.

There is no question that McCain was a leader on immigration reform. But in 2007 when his bill was brought back up by the a newly elected Democratic Senate (it passed a GOP controlled Senate in 2006) McCain was nowhere to be found. Spooked by his early primary stumbles, McCain distanced himself from his own bill, and forced Democrats to negotiate with GOP leaders like John Kyl who had opposed the bill in 2006. The end result of McCain's betrayal of his own bill was without the bill's author, the bill collapsed and progress on fixing our broken immigration system stopped. In a recent interview on Meet the Press, McCain even suggested he would no longer vote for his bill if it came up.

So can McCain claw his way back with Hispanics, given how far his Party has fallen with them? Perhaps, but given his betrayal on this critical issue, his connection to the deeply unpopular Bush, his lack of any real plan for universal health coverage and his strong support of the war (Hispanics are and have been more against the war than the public at large), I think the decision McCain made to walk from his own bill in 2007 to appease GOP primary voters managed to both get him nothing with the anti-immigrant wing of his own Party while at the same time tossing away any chance he had of getting his necessary share with Hispanic voters in 2008.

Update: MSNBC's First Read has a must read account of a conference call today with Harold Ickes of the Clinton campaign, where, among other things, he makes the case for why the election results in Florida and Michigan need to be counted even though as a member of the DNC he voted to strip them of their delegates thus nullifying the results of their elections.

Update 2: TNR's Jonathan Cohn also condems the Clinton Florida and Michigan play, and Josh Marshall captures the anger many feel at the recent wave of Clintonian threats to play games with the system.