Could Clinton be on the rise, again?

I strongly recommend my favourite podcast on American politics : It's All Politics from NPR. This is truely an excellent show : it's short (15 minutes), features two entertaining commentators and is clever and thought provoking. Ron Elving and Ken Rudin were commenting on the recent developments of the Reverend Wright affair. As you may remember, Sen. Obama had  come under serious fire for the inflamatory rhetoric of his longtime pastor. As a response he had delivered an already famous speech on race. 

Jeremiah Wright has come back to haunt & hurt the Obama campaign : the pastor has recently given several speech in which he justified his most controversial comments and in which he clearly presented the attacks against him as indictments of the Black church. He is trying to make the contreversy broader and no longer personal. 

 This has proved a serious embarrassment to the Senator from Illinois who has now distanced himself from his former pastor (Jeremiah Wright is no longer the leading pastor of Trinity United Church). 

The radical approach of Rev. Wright to race politics and criticism of America has lead many to wonder whether Wright's feelings were reflecting that of a majority of Black churches. And what does this mean about Obama's message of racial reconciliation? 

Obama is probably being hurt significantly by these events. And indeed, he may be losing support in the public; this scandal will certainly make him vulnerable in the general election campaign, for there is no doubt that he will have to take a lot flak from the Republicans on account of Rev. Wright and despite the fact that he has now emphatically rejected his pastor's radical critique of white America. 

Paradoxically, although he might be losing some of his attraction for the public, a growing number of senior Democrats and superdelegates are endorsing him: former President Jimmy Carter hailed Obama's candidacy as welcomed change and  Joe Andrew switched allegiances from Clinton to Obama.

Is it possible that Obama may win the nomination mainly thanks to the support of superdelegates (a couple weeks ago I raised the same question about a possible Clinton victory, tables turned!)

Obama appears to have defeated Sen Clinton with the narrowest of margins in the Guam primary. 

Tuesday two  more States will be voting : Indiana and North Carolina. Although Sen. Obama has always been expected to win by a huge margin in N.C., his lead in the polls has not been growing. For a presentation of the most recent polls, you may want to check out the interviw with Mark Blumenthal on NPR's website.

For more detailed coverage, refer to the links to the media. Some of the differences on the approach to economic policy are well explained in an informative NYT video on the subject.