Clinton, Obama Make Night Of It: Ohio Runs Tight

COLUMBUS, Ohio—This was it for Hillary Clinton.

No more caveats. No more delegate arithmetic. No more new-and-improved message. Even her most fervent backers failed to envision an avenue to the nomination if she did not come out of Ohio with a win.

“She would have to make a decision there,” Governor Ted Strickland said when asked this week what would happen if she failed to win his state. “I would have to leave that decision to her and her advisers. But if she wins Ohio, I think she should go on.”

It appears she will.

At press time, just as the Ohio polls closed, the campaign immediately declared that it had met the bar it had set, predicting popular-vote victories in Ohio and Texas—the two big prizes of the night—as well as Rhode Island. (The other March 4, Vermont, went lopsidedly for Barack Obama.)

“Let me be crystal clear: Hillary Clinton is not going anywhere,” said permanently enthusiastic national campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe. “She’s going to Denver as the nominee.”

According to the exit polls, six in 10 Ohio Democrats had said that the economy was the most important issue in deciding their vote. Eight in 10 had said that international trade caused the state to lose jobs. (The Clinton campaign was sharply critical of Mr. Obama in the days leading up to the primary for what they said was the inconsistency of his rhetoric on the North American Free Trade Agreement.)

In the days leading up to the Ohio primary, Clinton supporters from across the country came to Ohio to hold down their candidate’s fort.

Irene Biller-Berkson, a 73-year-old retired art teacher from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, had taken an overnight bus to Cleveland. She spent Saturday knocking on doors in snow-dampened boots around nearby Parma Heights. During a breather in the Yorktown Service Plaza, which smelled overpoweringly of bacon, she leaned her elbows against the counter, eating a Three Musketeers bar, sipping coffee and evangelizing for Mrs. Clinton.

“Hope, hope, change, change—the guy’s a neophyte,” Ms. Biller-Berkson said to Rebecca Di Pietro, the 21-year-old cashier. “I’d rather get something I know than something I don’t know.”

She took a bite of her candy bar and adjusted her wool hat, which was decorated with Hillary campaign buttons.

“He can’t even say the word ‘Massachusetts’ right,” Ms. Biller-Berkson said, while chewing. “He said Massatussets. And the guy went to Harvard.”

“I say wutter, not water,” said Ms. Di Pietro, coldly. “A lot of people have trouble saying some words. I don’t think that means they aren’t going to know how to run the country.”

“Well, it’s just a side issue,” Ms. Biller-Berkson replied.

The main issue for the Clinton campaign, the one they had settled on after all was said and done, was that Mrs. Clinton was more prepared and ready to be commander in chief.

On the stump, Mrs. Clinton sold it hard, running an intensely local-feeling campaign that seemed at times more like a bid for governor of Ohio than president of the United States.

On Thursday afternoon, in Hanging Rock, a small town across the border from West Virginia in the states’ southern Appalachian region, she talked about how she had been in a Bob Evans restaurant earlier in the day, and that she wanted to discuss “the kitchen table issues that everyone of us has to worry about.”

She invited onto the stage two single mothers, one thin and one heavy, to talk about their troubles. Another woman cried as she asked a question about mounting debt.

“People in southeast Ohio,” Mrs. Clinton said, “are salt-of-the-earth, great people.” She said “y’all.”

“She’s trying to reach out to the regular people, the Middle America, nine-to-five people,” said Ralph Kline, 53, of nearby Ironton. “They want to see something solid to believe in. They are looking for answers. And she’s the one who has given the most detail.”

While Mrs. Clinton did her retail work, the campaign was bidding for dominance on the ground, with hundreds of volunteers, staffers and surrogates canvassing the state with the help of Governor Strickland’s staffers and operatives.

On Feb. 29, at the Clinton campaign’s Columbus headquarters—located across the street from a Bridgestone, BF Goodrich and Dayton Tires garage—everyone was in a hurry.

“We’re going to make Katie drive all over northern Ohio,” said Ellen Malcolm, the president of the women’s group EMILY’s List, as she walked out the doors.