Smash hit

Instead of coasting down the road to the convention in Denver as the prohibitive Democratic frontrunner – a realistic possibility until this week – Mr Obama now faces a rocky road to the nomination.

He will be harried at every stage by Hillary Clinton who predicts many “interesting twists and turns” to come.

First stop is the suitably mountainous state of Wyoming which holds it caucuses tomorrow, followed by a vote in Mississippi on Tuesday. Mr Obama expects to win both states, cancelling out most, if not all, the gains Mrs Clinton made on Tuesday night with her triple triumph in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island.

He has a seemingly insurmountable lead over her of 140 in elected delegates, a margin which would narrow only to an estimated 84 in the unlikely event of Mrs Clinton winning every remaining primary by 10 points.

But the blizzard of memos coming from his aides explaining why he cannot be caught, reflects how Mr Obama has been changed from a candidate of inspiration and hope – to one remorselessly grinding out the logic of what Mrs Clinton calls a “mathematical calculation”.

Her campaign, though still riven by internal dissent, appears to have recovered some of its former self-belief and discovered a source of previously untapped passion. Advisers say she can win the nomination by raising doubts in the minds of both voters and Democratic party super-delegates about whether Mr Obama is ready to be commander-in-chief – or strong enough to withstand attacks from Republicans in November’s general election.

Mr Obama’s team have got been so spooked over claim that he is all talk and no action that they are increasingly leery of the big rallies – where he has excelled – and say they want to do more small “roundtable” discussions.

Mrs Clinton’s aides are pointing to the next big contest in Pennsylvania, where she is backed by popular politicians and which has a similar blue collar demographic to Ohio.

They tell super-delegates to think twice before picking a candidate who has failed to win in any major states except for his home base of Illinois. And there are already suggestions that Mrs Clinton may overtake Mr Obama in the popular vote before the convention, giving the 795 super-delegates a reason to defy the will of voters from caucuses and primaries.

One Clinton aide yesterday derided Mr Obama’s victories in “boutique” caucus states rather than the hardscrabble terrain of the rustbelt, saying: “Obama has won the small caucus states with the latte-sipping crowd. They don’t need a president, they need a feeling.”

But the concern in the party is that Mrs Clinton will succeed in wounding Mr Obama without quite killing him off. That task, warned a senior Democrat, would be “left to Senator McCain in the general election”.

Others point to the title of her book, It Takes A Village To Raise A Child, suggesting Mrs Clinton may now be more intent on “rasing the village – to the ground”.

In his own book, The Audacity of Hope, Mr Obama expressed nostalgia for a time when presidential conventions used to “capture the urgency and drama of politics”. He even complained these occasions had more recently become “bereft of surprises”, serving merely as a “week-long infomercial for the party and its nominee”.

He should, perhaps, have been a little more careful about what he wished for.

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