Morning News
From the Austin American Statesman:
[Obama and Clinton,] running neck-and-neck in Texas, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Thursday, appeared together less than two weeks before the March 4 primaries in Texas and Ohio in which 389 delegates will ultimately be at stake — a pile that could refuel Clinton’s effort if she wins big or put Obama well on his way to the nomination.
Nearly 2,000 people attended the invitation-only debate, mostly guests of UT and the Democratic Party. The audience included Democratic Texas lawmakers, 400 UT students and 200 registered Texas voters who won tickets in two separate drawings that thousands entered.
… Calli Rudebusch, 18, a UT freshman from Conroe majoring in government, said that seeing Obama in person solidified her support of him (she said she already voted for him). But she was thrilled to get Clinton’s autograph and be there to witness history from her bleacher seat near the Longhorn band. "I really feel that 20, 30 years down the line," she said, "I’m going to look back and go, ‘Wow, I was there.’
From the Austin American Statesman:
The Obama rally in front of the telegenic Texas Capitol, which figures to draw a massive crowd downtown, is likely to be the best-attended political event in Austin since, well, Obama’s outdoor rally almost a year ago, when he drew thousands to Auditorium Shores. Tonight’s event already prompted the closure of a T-shaped piece of Congress and 11th at midnight and will require more nearby streets (and more of Congress and 11th) to be shut down at 6 p.m. today.
… More than 40,000 people sought tickets to last night’s debate between Obama and his main opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, a figure that of course would have included many Clinton supporters.
Then there’s the 15,000-plus who came to see Obama here a year ago, when he was given only an outside shot at the Democratic nomination.
And a good number of young people, a core Obama constituency, would be downtown anyway on a Friday night. … As for what is likely to be a considerable mess Saturday morning, Huffman said volunteers from the Obama campaign and the Downtown Austin Alliance will handle the bulk of the cleanup.
From the Washington Post:
Barack Obama’s winning streak continued Thursday with his 11th straight victory in a primary or caucus.
The American expatriates represented by the group Democrats Abroad went overwhelmingly for their party’s front-runner, who spent part of his childhood as an expat himself, living with his family in Indonesia. Voting in the Democrats Abroad Global Primary took place Feb. 5 to 12.
Obama won 65.6 percent of the expat vote, which numbered more than 20,000, to Hillary Clinton’s 32.7 percent, according to the group. Voters in 30 nations cast ballots at polling stations, while others voted by fax, mail and — for the first time this year — online. Online voters submitted ballots from 164 countries and territories.
At stake were 4.5 pledged delegates. Obama won 2.5 of them, while Clinton won two.
"With the U.S. image so badly damaged by the present Administration, American Democrats living overseas were eager to have their voices heard," Christine Schon Marques, international chairman of Democrats Abroad in Geneva, said in a statement.
“You don’t get anywhere without big dreams,” Michelle Obama said in an interview yesterday after addressing a women’s audience at the Providence Biltmore. Without big dreams, she said, she’d never have found herself at Princeton and Harvard Law.
Still, she said of her husband, “He doesn’t enter into this naïvely. He’s worked in politics, in some of the toughest politics that you might see in Illinois … He knows that real change requires a lot of hard work and sometimes you don’t win them all. But what he also knows is that if you don’t come in with a unified base of support, and if you’re not willing to look beyond your own partisan situation and build new bridges, that you can’t get anything done.
“And that’s what the hope is about — it’s engaging enough people in the process to hold the system accountable in ways that we haven’t seen in a long time.”
