TOLEDO, OHIO — Heading into a potentially decisive round of contests today, Hillary Rodham Clinton stayed on the attack against rival Barack Obama on Monday, trying to turn around a campaign that has been battered by 11 straight defeats.
Many political observers -- including Clinton's husband, the former president -- have said she needs strong victories in delegate-rich Texas and Ohio to remain a serious challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination. Those contests have overshadowed the primaries also taking place today in Rhode Island and Vermont.
Still, in a campaign season highlighted by its unpredictability, other political analysts say that if neither Clinton nor Obama scores a pair of solid wins in Texas and Ohio, the battle might continue on to the April 22 Pennsylvania primary -- or even beyond.
Clinton herself suggested Monday that she planned to press ahead. "I'm just getting warmed up," she said at a news conference here. Political analysts said a surprising double loss for Clinton in the two big states today, however, would almost certainly doom the candidacy of the one-time front-runner.
"If she loses both states, nobody is going to believe any spin" that there is life left in the Clinton campaign, said Donnie Fowler, a Democratic strategist who was Al Gore's national field director when Gore ran for president in 2000.
"Her own surrogates, including her husband, have set the bar pretty high, but pretty clear for her," Fowler added. "She probably needs to win both Ohio and Texas, and she certainly needs to win one of those states."
Gale Kaufman, a Democratic political consultant who worked on Bill Bradley's 2000 campaign for the presidency, agreed that Clinton needed clear triumphs in Texas and Ohio to overcome her opponent's momentum and catch up in the delegate count.
If Clinton falls short of that, Kaufman said, "it's hard for the Obama campaign not to have the upper hand at that point and not to say: 'Look, the math doesn't work. We have seven weeks before the next major primary; that's time that really could be used effectively to bring everyone together.' "
On the other hand, Kaufman said, if Clinton wins convincingly in Ohio, where the polls show her with a lead, and keeps the combined primary-caucus close in Texas, where surveys show the candidates neck and neck, "it's going to be really difficult for her to feel like she should get out."
