First broadcast was Friday night on Hannity & Colmes.

After Barack Obama’s speech in San Antonio (after he lost Ohio but before he knew he lost the primary in Texas), his chief strategist David Axelrod spoke briefly to The Bourbon Room about the outcome of Super Tuesday Part II and the campaign ahead.

Here is the transcript:

First The Bourbon Room asked how Obama’s camp would deal with the perception that Clinton has slowed Obama’s momentum and fought herself back into the race:

“Well, that’s a perception that they’re spinning, but they set their own test. It’s not our delegate riff, they started the delegate riff. Their delegate riff was that “We are going to wipe out the delegate lead on March 4.” The fact is they haven’t changed their situation at all. They may have changed perceptions a little bit. We don’t know what’s happening here in Texas, we’ll see what happens in Texas, but we’re probably going to win the delegate fight here in Texas. Ultimately, this is a race for delegates. We’ve got a substantial lead. We’ve won 28 contests to their 13. We’ve won more popular votes. We’ve won in every part of the country. We’ve put together a coalition of independents, Democrats and Republicans. We’ve energized young people in a way they haven’t been in a generation. And we’ve shown the ability to put together a coaltion that is going to take on John McCain and beat John McCain and that’s why we’re doing so much better than she in so many polls against McCain. I don’t think this materially changes anything. It may extend the race, but I don’t think it’s going to change the outcome.”

The Bourbon Room then asked: “They hit you hard, are you going to hit hard back?”

Axelrod: “I think we’re willing to join the debate. If they want to define the debate in terms of the issues they’ve laid out in the past week, if they want to throw the kitchen sink, they’re going to engender a response. If they want to have a discussion about ethics, then we’ll have a discussion about ethics. If they want to have a discussion about who is prepared to be commander in chief, then we’re going to ask the hard questions about the decisions that’s she’s made. If she wants to say she’s going to be a steward of the economy, and talk about her accomplishments in public life, then we’re going to talk about that. It isn’t going to be a one-way debate. “

It will be very interesting to see how far Obama’s campaign goes with its response/reaction to Clinton now. If Axelrod follows through on discussing Clinton’s ethics, commander-in-chief qualifications and capability to run the economy in the context of hard, negative ads against Clinton, the campaign will cross yet another Rubicon. Hillary Clinton crossed one with the “3 a.m.” ad and the risk paid off. The Clinton camp knew there could be a backlash among Democrats who resent using terror fears to make a political point. The gamble paid off as exit polling data shows the “3 a.m.” ad helped Clinton reverse the slide and eke out a victory in Texas. Obama would run the risk, if he ran negative ads, of abandoning his “new brand of politics,” but it might also prove his grit and determination to win — something Democrats in and out of the trenches now question.

We’ll see if Axelrod was venting or plotting. And we’ll see soon enough.

The race wil turn again today. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will emerge from Super Tuesday Part II as co-front-runners. That’s the consensus of more and more Democrats watching this race from the trenches and from afar.

The most likely scenario tonight, according to top officials in both campaigns, is Clinton wins Ohio and Rhode Island comfortably and fights Obama to a tie or ekes out a victory in Texas in the popular vote. The only safe state in the Obama column this morning, by mutual agreement of both camps, is Vermont.

The question in Texas is who wins the pledged delegates alloted from the primary and subsequent caucuses. Obama could win the delegate hunt while still losing the popular vote because of the weighting of delegates in African-America state senate districts and those allocated through the caucus process where Obama’s grassroots organization may out-perform Clinton’s.

Obama’s Texas operatives have grown more nervous about Obama’s prospects in Texas since Friday. They readily concede the “3 a.m.” ad from Clinton changed the dynamic and undecided voters began to move toward Clinton over the weekend.

Clinton’s lead in Ohio, according to Clinton field organizers, sits at about 6 points but there is a sense that late-breaking voters — as they have in the past — are moving toward Clinton and her margin of victory could exceed 6 points there.

Already, the Obama camp is out with a Super Tuesday Part II pre-buttal. Chief spokesman Bill Burton sent the following e-mail to campaign reporters at 9 a.m. EST:

“The Clinton campaign said this race was all about delegates and that they would be tied or ahead by morning. But despite the 20-point lead in Ohio and Texas that Senator Clinton had just two weeks ago, we will still be well ahead in delegates tonight and they will have failed at achieving their plainly stated goals. They have floated proposal after proposal to try to subvert the will of Democratic voters and retrospectively change the rules of the nominating process, but the bottom line is that it will still be virtually impossible for them to catch up in delegates after tonight.”

To this, Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, had this direct response to The Bourbon Room placing that Burton quote before him on a conference call with reporters at 11:30 a.m EST:

“First, I would invite anyone on this call to judge, based on those remarks, who thinks there in a better position in Ohio and Texas. Two, here’s the bottom line: this party is not going to nominate someone against John McCain who can’t pass the commander in chief test and can’t pass the steward of the economy test. And I think we’re going to see tonight voters saying Sen. Obama has not passed that test. I think it is that simple. We are simply not going to nominate someone who voters have doubts about as commander in chief and steward of the economy.”

Since Clinton, as The Bourbon Room noted Sunday, framed Texas as the place for the debate on national security and Ohio as the place for the debate on stewardship of the economy, that was Wolfson’s way of predicting victories in Texas and Ohio — without actually saying so.

The results tonight will raise significant questions about Obama’s campaign, some of which are already being asked in Democratic circles.

Why wasn’t his campaign able to win these four contests and definitively end the fight for the nomination, especially after having a massive financial advantage that blanketed the airwaves in Texas and Ohio with ads that ran four and five times more frequently than Clinton’s (last Thursday night in Houston, The Bourbon Room saw 10 Obama ads in the space of an hour without seeing one Clinton ad). The true party experts will also ponder, if Obama fails to win Ohio and Texas, how the grassroots and TV and radio ad efforts of the Service Employees International Union and United Food and Commerical Workers. These endorsements were supposed to cement Obama’s hold on both states and give him the added organizational power and media message to put both big states away. Increasingly, it appears these organizational and media advantages will have been squandered.

This could raise new questions in the mind of Superdelegates as to Obama’s staying power and political prowess. The Obama camp will argue that it trailed badly to Clinton in both states, fought hard and lost but still leads in pledged delegates and the race is still, basically, over. That’s the core of Burton’s argument above. They will further argue that Superdelegates should move to Obama to avoid a nasty seven-week campaign in Pennsylvania where Obama is going to be bloodied by Clinton and weakened for the upcoming contest with McCain.

The Clinton camp will argue that where it has fought Obama and fought him hard, it has won and that MUST matter. The Clinton camp has stalled defections of Superdelegates by privately making — in so many words — the following argument: don’t defect to Obama, not until March 4. Let us fight until March 4 and if we win, stay neutral or re-evaluate Hillary as a potential nominee.

Many Superdelegates have accepted this wait-and-see approach. The ones — about 40 — who have gone to Obama were not willing to wait and feared that even if Clinton lost Ohio or Texas she wouldn’t drop out.

Clinton will clearly not drop out. She’s heading straight to Pennsylvania after her victory celebration and, as The Bourbon Room predicted on Sunday, we are now heading to Super Tuesday Part III.

Sen. Obama came to the back of the press plane to talk informally about anything but politics. Family time - or the lack of it- and the Fishbowl for his two daughters if he wins.

Hillary Clinton’s top priority has been changing lately depending on where she’s campaigning, a strategy that Clinton is banking on to appeal to voters in the crucial states of Ohio and Texas, which vote in primaries and caucuses on Tuesday.

In Texas, Clinton’s focused on national security. Her “3 a.m.” television ad, which asks voters who they trust to manage a crisis, hit the airwaves on Friday and her campaign is emphasizing the issue in many discussions in the Lone Star State.

In Ohio on Sunday, Clinton told a sparsely attended but enthusiastic rally in Austintown that “the economy is the No. 1 issue in this campaign.”

While some might call this rhetorical schizophrenia, it’s about a specific targeting strategy that will determine whether Clinton emerges from Super Tuesday 2 as a credible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

With 11 straight losses lending a funereal air to her campaign in the last week, Clinton has soldiered on and still holds a narrow lead against Barack Obama in Ohio. She appears to have slightly narrowed the gap in Texas.

Clinton’s gambling on national security to draw conservative so-called “Yellow Dog Democrats” in east and central-west Texas. The campaign is counting on this breed of voter supporting Clinton after re-evaluating Obama’s credentials and his backbone to withstand the rigors of a national security crisis.

“We’re on our turf now,” said a senior Clinton adviser, referring to the national security debate.

In Ohio, where the “3 a.m.” ad is not running at all (it’s only airing sporadically in Texas), the economy rules and the good news for Clinton is in Sunday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer poll, which puts Clinton up 47 percent to 43 percent over Obama.

The issue of free trade does not seem to be hurting Clinton as hard as advisers feared it might.

“The issue should be killing us and it’s not,” a top Clinton field organizer in Ohio told FOX News.

The Plain Dealer poll showed Obama and Clinton essentially split on the North American Free Trade Agreement, a trade deal passed during Bill Clinton’s presidency and widely blamed for bleeding the state of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

Obama has stoked anti-NAFTA sentiments across the state and reads widely from praiseworthy comments Clinton has uttered in the past.

A tie on NAFTA gives Clinton a fighting chance to win Ohio, owing to her solid support among women and growing support among low-income white men.

Obama’s counter-strategy is to out-organize Clinton on the ground. Volunteers are pouring into Ohio from across the country — largely on their own dime — to canvass for Obama this weekend. The campaign’s goal is to knock on 1 million doors this weekend.

Obama also has the grassroots support of the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union — big assets in the state’s larger cities.

In Texas, Obama’s camp says it is not worrying about the national security debate.

“Our judgment on this issue in the campaign has been just as solid as Obama’s in opposing the Iraq war,” a senior adviser said. “We know Democrats were drawn to us because of Barack’s opposition to the war and this gives an opportunity to remind Democrats of that.”

Obama has better ground forces in Texas also — at least three times as many on-the-ground volunteers as Clinton — and he is far better prepared to organize and win the post-primary caucuses on Tuesday evening.

The key for Obama is to win the popular vote and delegates distributed through primary and caucus returns and to deny Clinton any opportunity to diminish the Texas results by blaming the complicated two-step primary and caucus process — unique on the election calendar this year. If Clinton only extracts a victory in Ohio on Tuesday, Obama will argue she’s failed her own Texas-Ohio test and ought to contemplate leaving the race.

Top Democrats who thought it likely March 4 would be Clinton’s last stand now fret that close contests in Ohio and Texas could leave the outcome opaque and give Clinton a reason to fight on — especially after raising $35 million in February.

“She’ll say I raised all that money and a million dollars a day on the Internet and those people don’t want me to quit,” a top Democratic strategist said.

Another Democrat who served in the Clinton administration but has soured on the Clinton political machine said: “Too much time since the last vote (the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary) has allowed Hillary to pick herself up off the floor.”

A muddled Super Tuesday Part 2 could send the campaign into a seven-week trek through Pennsylvania before its April 22 primary.

Sen. Obama came to the back of the press plane to talk informally about anything but politics. Family time - or the lack of it- and the Fishbowl for his two daughters if he wins the presidency dominated the brief encounter. 

http://media2.foxnews.com/030308/030308_obama_plane_MPEG4.mp4