"Aggressive and desperate"

Which nominee is the Economist describing? You make the call.

Barack Obama Rolls On

"Mr Obama has confirmed his status as the front-runner whereas Mrs Clinton, to have any chance, must somehow engineer sizeable victories in Ohio and Texas on March 4th. They once looked very favourable to her and she still leads in opinion polls. But Mr Obama’s big win in Wisconsin bodes well for him in nearby Ohio, which shares a big white working class. Texas’s unusual hybrid primary-and-caucus vote makes it hard to win a big delegate advantage even with a hefty win among voters. And Mr Obama, carrying the aura of a winner, has narrowed Mrs Clinton's lead in both states and has two weeks to focus his campaign on them.

Mrs Clinton has two strategies left to her. One is to sharpen her attacks on her rival. Before Wisconsin her campaign staff had pushed a story that Mr Obama used speech lines lifted from Deval Patrick, his friend and the governor of Massachusetts. Mr Obama and Mr Patrick shrugged this off, voters were unbothered. Instead Mrs Clinton is likely to stress her theme of greater experience, while ramping up her economic populism. She did both in a speech after polls closed on Tuesday. She said she would lead “without on-the-job training”. She also argued, more substantively, about his health-care proposal. Hers would require every American to have insurance. His would lack such a mandate, which, she said, would leave 15m people uninsured. Expect this number to crop up repeatedly in the next few weeks.

The other path for Mrs Clinton is the inside politics of getting the delegate count more favourable to her. She and her husband are leaning hard on Democratic bigwigs and politicians known as superdelegates, who may vote for anyone they wish at the nominating convention. Having closer connections with the party leaders, they hope superdelegates might help her pull out a win even if she loses to Mr Obama in “pledged” delegates chosen by the primaries.

And she continues her fight to seat the delegations from Michigan and Florida. Both states had their delegates stripped for holding contests earlier than Democratic rules allowed. And all campaigns agreed not to run there. But Mrs Clinton’s name alone remained on the Michigan ballot, meaning she won it by a big margin. And as no one campaigned in Florida she won handily, mainly on the strength of her greater name recognition.

The risk for Mrs Clinton is that she gets stuck with a reputation for being willing to do anything to get the nomination, even if that were to mean stealing away Mr Obama’s electoral victory. With the fight against Mr McCain looming, she runs the risk of looking both aggressive and desperate, hardly the person the Democrats would want taking on the Republicans’ genial and confident war hero."