The following is Major Garrett’s interview with Hillary Clinton Wednesday:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

For the first time since mid-February, Barack Obama closed strongly in heavily contested primaries Tuesday and out-distanced Hillary Clinton in ways that defied expectations.

Obama’s camp felt internally that it would finish well in Indiana and North Carolina and the evidence suggests it did.

Obama’s pre-primary polling average in North Carolina showed an 8-point average lead for Obama. It appears he out-performed that average by a full 4 points.

Similarly, in Indiana Obama trailed Clinton on average by roughly 6 points. It appears he will outperform that average by 4 or 5 points.

This is not an outcome either campaign expected.

Obama’s campaign did not expect to win Indiana or fight Clinton to something close to a tie. The Obama camp also internally wondered if the outcome in North Carolina could be a low single-digit win or a margin of, at most, 10 points.

In both categories, Obama bested his own expectations.

This matters in the larger context of how the party will view Obama’s overall electability.

By outperforming his polling average in both states, Obama can credibly argue his out-organized Clinton and his overall message resonated even as he spent, in the words of  campaign manager David Plouffe, “two weeks on the griddle.”

One of the key questions is whether Obama won the “day of” primary, meaning that he carried the votes cast on Election Day. It’s clear Obama crushed Clinton in early votes cast in both states. A good portion of these votes where cast before the controversy over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright took hold a second time in the campaign and before Clinton engaged Obama in a debate over her proposal for a federal gasoline tax holiday.

This was a key difference in the Clinton and Obama strategies heading into these primaries. Obama’s camp worked overtime to solicit support in early voting. Clinton made virtually no effort on this front as her campaign, by necessity, focused resources solely on Pennsylvania to ensure the biggest victory possible.

This strategic difference was fueled in part by the monetary advantage Obama’s long-enjoyed in recent months.

That advantage did not translate into Obama over-performing his polling average in Texas, Ohio or Pennsylvania. It appears it very much did in Indiana and North Carolina and may bring Obama closer than ever before to closing down the long-running contest for the Democratic nomination.

With the Clinton campaign in Scranton, Pa.

UPDATE:

Shortly after this post went up, Barack Obama told listeners to KDKA radio in Pittsburgh that he is not  “predicting a victory” in Pennsylvania. There is no correlation to this post and that Obama pronouncement.

Also, the Clinton campaign, through chief strategist Geoff Garin and communications director Howard Wolfson, “categorically deny” a Drudge post that internal campaign polls show Clinton leading by 11. However, Wolfson also says Clinton expects to “narrow the popular vote considerably” after the Pennsylvnia primary — this a reference to Obama’s lead in the popular vote through all nominating contests. It does not appear possible for Clinton to achieve Wolfson’s narrow considerably standard without a double-digit victory.

Most importantly, the post below says the last competitive presidental primary in Pennsylvania occurred in 1976. THIS IS WRONG. Democrat and Bourbon Room devotee Mary Anne Marsh reminds me that the 1980 nomination battle between Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and then-President Jimmy Carter went down to the wire in Pennsylvania, with Kennedy winning a narrow victory that was not sealed until two days later following a recount of votes in Montgomery County in suburban Philadelphia. The Philly suburbs were important then and they’re important now. THAT much The Bourbon Room got right.

Can a candidate win a presidential primary after never polling above 45 percent?

In theory, it’s possible. But it’s not very damn likely.

This is Barack Obama’s problem in Pennsylvania. And the Obama camp knows it. It will not predict victory because it knows that’s not possible. Obama’s goal is to minimize the magnitude of Clinton’s victory and fight tenaciously to win the perceptions/expectations war. Adjectives used to describe a 6-point Clinton victory (narrow, unimpressive, underwhelming) and a 12-point victory for Clinton (decisive, impressive, sizable) will in large measure dictate the way Super Delegates and contributors view Tuesday’s result.

The polling data suggests the race is close. But the polls, it seems, have a flaw almost identical to the polls in Ohio. Those polls pretty accurately predicted Obama’s support but under-counted Clinton’s.

The average of the ten polls in Ohio before Super Tuesday Part Two showed Clinton at 50.3 and Obama’s at 43.4. Clinton won the primary 54 to 44.

Here in Pennsylvania, Clinton’s average in the 10 most recent polls is 48.8 and Obama’s is 42.5. If Clinton out-performs the polls here as she did in Ohio and Obama hits his poll mark, Tuesday’s results will be 53 percent to 43 percent.

Is a 10-point victory enough for Clinton? It’s not enough to close the pledged delegate gap by very much. The Obama worst-case scenario is for Clinton to pick up 20 pledged delegates in a blowout well above 10 points for Clinton. But team Obama is betting on a Clinton pickup of 10 or fewer pledged delegates, in part because they expect to roll up big margins of victory in Philadelphia’s urban congressional districts.

So much of Tuesday’s results will be dictated by the ground war in the City of Brotherly Love and the surrounding suburbs. Seven of Pennsylvania’s 19 congressional districts are in Philadelphia or within 60 miles. Obama’s team hopes to win the African-American vote in Philadelphia by a margin of 90 percent to 10 percent (and believe urban backlash to the ABC debate last Wednesday helps enormously).

Obama is also looking for solid support in the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia, which is why Obama hopped aboard a train and gave speeches at and slow-rolled through numerous commuter train stops in the Philly suburbs.

But Obama must out-work and out-muscle the combined forces of Gov. Ed Rendell, a former mayor of Philadelphia, and the city’s current mayor, Michael Nutter. In the most important, vote-rich part of the state, Clinton has powerful allies who know where the votes are, how to mobilize them and how to motivate them.

The key question: how much political capital will Rendell and Nutter spend in Philadelphia when they know the social movement behind Obama is so strong there. Obama has mentioned at every stop since Friday the crowd of 35,000 he drew Friday night in Philadelphia. The message is clear to Rendell and Nutter — push against the tide of support at your own risk because these constituents and their long memories will be around after the presidential parade leaves Pennsylvania.

There’s one other factor to keep an eye on: who won the new registrant wars. About 165,000 new Democratic voters have registered for this primary since January. The Obama campaign says it has conducted a quietly effective registration drive in Philadelphia and intend to spring tens of thousands of new voters on Clinton.

This is a potential problem for Clinton. As her campaign readily acknowledges, turnout models in Pennsylvania are unreliable. The state hasn’t had a truly competitive Democratic presidential primary since 1976. Again, this is where Rendell and Nutter come in. If anyone in Pennsylvania knows who these new voters are and how to reach them in southeastern Pennsylvania, it is these two. The Clinton team would be far more worried about the X-factor of newly registered Democrats if they didn’t have Rendell and Nutter on their side.

One last point about Pennsylvania. Obama’s worked much harder here than he did in Ohio. Person-to-person contact and the Obama aura are still his best assets on the trail and he’s put them to exhaustive use in the closing hours, even coming up here to Scranton last night just to rattle Clinton’s cage in what’s supposed to be — and probably will be — Clinton country to the tune of 75 percent to 25 percent.

Corey O’Brien, a county commissioner in Lackawanna County, told me Obama made the trip to Scranton to prove he was ceding nothing to Clinton and to eat into Clinton’s base. O’Brien said if Obama can move Clinton down to the mid-60s in the Scranton area that will make his margins in the Philly area all the more important. Tactics like this were non-existent for Obama in Ohio and could make the difference between a 10-point or 12-point loss and a 6-point or 8-point loss.

And it is between these numbers, that Super Delegates, contributors and the news media will decide what happened in Pennsylvania, what it says about Obama’s general election prospects and if Clinton has earned her right to credibly continue her bid for the nomination

Mark Penn, chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, quit Sunday.

The official reason: his meeting last Monday with the Colombian ambassador in Washington to discuss strategy to pass the U.S.-Colombia free trade pact that Sen. Clinton vehemently opposes.

Why was Penn meeting with the Colombians?

Because he’s always had another job as chief executive of Burson Marsteller Worldwide. Burson, you see, has a lucrative contract with the Colombian government to win congressional passage of the bilateral trade deal. Penn met with the Colombian government within hours of a Clinton speech to the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO in which she pledged to fight the trade deal in part because the Colombian government beats and intimidates union organizers.

Having your chief strategist plot strategy to pass a trade deal you oppose for reasons of economic and bedrock politics is, how should we say, awkward.

Penn bargained successfully for his job Friday, when the story first broke in The Wall Street Journal. He sent around apologetic e-mails to senior staff and apologized to Clinton by phone. The typically air-tight Clinton campaign was authorized to speak on background that Clinton and her senior staff were furious at Penn — a clear sign his days might be numbered.

Pressure built over the weekend as members of Congress with strong union ties and top union officials demanded swift action against Penn. Friends of Clinton had long disagreed with Penn’s strategy. Specifically, they questioned whether his obsessive tendency to slice and dice the electorate into microscopic sub-groups suitable for micro-targeted appeals was sufficient to compete against a full-fledged social movement in Barack Obama.

Those tensions had boiled under the surface for months and Clinton’s top delegate hunter, Harold Ickes, and her top ad consultant, Mandy Grunwald, had long been gunning for Penn. “Harold and Mandy must be very happy tonight,” a top Democratic source on Capitol Hill told The Bourbon Room on Sunday.

But Penn retained the unflinching loyalty of former President Bill Clinton, for whom he polled and offered strategic advice after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. Hillary also favored Penn for his work on her first and second campaigns for the U.S. Senate.

So why dump Penn this close to Pennsylvania where so much — dare I say everything — rides on a Clinton victory?

The campaign won’t say anything more than the meeting with the Colombian government was viewed as an unpardonable act of poor judgment (it won’t say betrayal but other Democrats not affiliated with the campaign do). The deeper reason, according to several top Democrats close to the Clinton camp, is that Penn’s continuation with the campaign threatened to disrupt the flow of money and the status of Super Delegates already committed to Hillary or those with whom she is actively negotiating support.

Clinton can’t afford a slow-down in fundraising. She needs every penny she can raise for the primary and her ability in February and March to solicit funds for the general election may make for decent fundraising headlines, but it doesn’t pay the bills now. And paying the bills now is Clinton’s top priority. Why? Because campaigns don’t end when the candidate decides he/she has had enough (because he/she never has enough). Campaigns end when the candidate can’t pay to keep the lights on.

Clinton also can’t stand any superdelegate defections or to suddenly have dozens of supers on the “negotiation” line suddenly stop answering their phones or ignoring Hillary’s e-mails. Money and superdelegates were about to slip away from Hillary if she kept Penn.

His departure, by the way, was not cause for panic, concern, alarm, remorse, regret, sadness, nostalgia or nausea in Hillaryland. Indeed, those were the reactions to Penn’s continued presence.

“Penn will always be linked to one strategic approach and one strategic approach only for Hillary’s campaign,” said Tony Coelho, former campaign manager for Al Gore in 2000. “And that was inevitability.

Penn cast Hillary as inevitable and everything flowed from that. But inevitable became imperial and began to hurt her. And then as the inevitable one, she didn’t compete in caucuses because she wouldn’t need them. If she had competed in those caucuses she would have won some and finished strong in the rest and would be ahead in delegates now. But Penn was all about inevitability. That drove institutional money to Hillary but it also drove grassroots money to Obama.”

Chris Kofinis served as John Edwards’ communications director and said the Edwards camp never understood Clinton’s approach to the race as the candidate of inevitability.

“Who roots for the inevitable candidate,” Kofinis asked. “It’s like Saturday’s NCAA national semi-final. Everyone expected North Carolina to wipe the floor with Kansas. So who do people cheer for? Kansas.”

Kofinis said Clinton’s pitch as the inevitable candidate helped her consolidate her base but left little or no room to expand the base. “Inevitability isn’t a rationale to vote for someone.”

Clinton adopted other approaches and campaign pitches, of course. She keyed on experience and results-oriented solutions. She then cast herself as a fighter .

She’s now casting herself as the manager of the Democrats’ Buyer’s Remorse Emporium. All of these appeals to voters came after the bubble of inevitability burst.

“Where campaigns end has a lot to do with where they begin,” Coelho said. “That’s where this one began.”

Coelho said he believes Obama could win Pennsylvania. As I write that, Dick Bennett at American Research Group, has just released a poll in Pennyslvania that shows Clinton and Obama tied at 45 percent. ARG’s numbers have been shaky this year but this is the second poll since Wednesday to show the race tied. Several other polls have showed Clinton’s lead shrinking. Whether the race is actually tied or not is less important than the inescapable truth that the trend favors Obama.

Every Democrat I talk to believes if Clinton loses Pennyslvania the race ends there. Why? Because Clinton has defined it as a can’t-lose, must-win state and Democrats eager to end the prolonged battle for the nomination will conclude Obama can win a “big state.”

More importantly, they will conclude that Democrats in an ethnically, economically, educationally and religiously diverse state will have sized up the candidates and the race and said we know the deal, and the race ends now. Obama’s the nominee. Let’s fight the Republicans.

The coverage of Penn’s departure will play up the sense of chaos and disorder at Hillary’s headquarters in Arlington, Va.

I have a different take. I believe Penn’s departure, while bad for headlines, could be good for the candidate and very good for her over-worked and beleaguered senior staff.

If Penn’s detractors are to believed, he had a suffocating effect on Clinton’s team, more probably than she fully realized. It is possible that those in Hillaryland who have smoldered for weeks or months about Penn’s approach to the campaign will find new freedom and new energy and the campaign will find within itself a sense of possibility and renewal. We will know the answer to this question within a week in terms of Clinton’s speeches and ads.

Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh believes that’s already happened with Clinton’s crisper and more economically focused stump speech. Clinton has also looked fresher and more inventive with ideas last to woo on-line donors by having them direct where in Pennsylvania their contribution will be spent and a new ad in North Carolina (where Clinton trails) soliciting questions about the economy that Clinton will answer in subsequent TV spots (yes, that’s a canned conversation, but it at least has a bit more flair than the standard TV spots and offers the prospect of more ads, signaling the campaign isn’t on its deathbed). If ever a campaign needed a blast of energy, enthusiasm and rebirth, it’s this one. Penn’s exit offers that possibility. But only that.

The more conventional analysis of Penn’s ouster is that the smell of death will overwhelm the staff and they will grow ever more morose at the loss of their chief scapegoat. That depression will only deepen into lethargy, the theory goes, with the realization that Penn’s heading back to his mega-bucks job at Burson while their own resumes and reputations will be forever smudged (tainted?) by the massive failure of the most “inevitable” campaign in American presidential history.

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

For those of you Bourbon Room loyalists, you well remember — or may have been trying to forget — my near-rhapsodic take on the Los Angeles debate, the first Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama tilt of the campaign.

No need to rhapsodize tonight. Instead of my thoughts, tonight I will pose a series of questions that may help us decide what mattered most and how the debate did or did not change the arc of this fascinating and historic Democratic pursuit of the presidency.

Note: Some questions I will answer for you. Have no fear, the answers will lead to other questions The Bourbon Room promises not to answer.

Here we go.

1. What does camp Clinton consider THE most important moment of the debate?

The lengthy and “passionate” exchange over universal health care?

No.

The debate over whether or not to impose a five-year moratorium on adjustable rate mortgages, as Clinton proposes and Obama opposes?

No.

The debate over how Clinton would restore “fiscal discipline” by ending Bush tax breaks for the wealthy and ending the Iraq war to invest in new infrastructure and start new “clean green jobs”?

No.

The answer came from Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson in the form of an e-mail sent to reporters at 9:57 p.m. EST, mere moments after the debate ended. The full contents of the Wolfson e-mail are reprinted here:

“What we saw in the final moments in that debate is why Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States. Her strength, her experience, her compassion. She’s tested and ready. It was the moment she retook the reins of this race and showed women and men why she is the best choice.”

Question: Do you agree and do you see anything relevant at all in the near-instantaneous framing of the “moment” by Sen. Clinton’s campaign?

Question: Does the following e-mail sent to reporters at 10:15 p.m. EST by Bill Burton, national spokesman for Barack Obama’s campaign, carry any weight with you?

“Clinton tonight: You know, whatever happens, we’re going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we’ll be able to say the same thing about the American people. And that’s what this election should be about.”

The Burton e-mail then includes this quote from John Edwards: “What’s not at stake are any of us. All of us are going to be just fine no matter what happens in this election. But what’s at stake is whether America is going to be fine.” The quote comes from a Democratic candidate debate on Dec. 13, 2007.

UPDATE from the Obama campaign at 11:35 p.m. EST:

Burton sent this e-mail: Yet another line lifted for what was her “best moment.”

Clinton tonight: “You know, the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country. And I resolved at a very young age that I’d been blessed and that I was called upon by my faith and by my upbringing to do what I could to give others the same opportunities and blessings that I took for granted. That’s what gets me up in the morning. That’s what motivates me in this campaign.”

President Clinton: “When the history of this campaign is written, they may say, well, Bill Clinton took a lot of hits in this campaign. The hits that I took in this election are nothing compared to the hits that people in this state and country are taking every day of their lives under this administration (Aug. 14, 2000).

Question: Does this second Obama e-mail on the Clinton “moment” matter to you or suggest anything to you about the degree of concern camp Obama has about the “moment”?

Which leads to a related question. Did you consider Clinton’s line against Obama on the question of lifting lines (or trading them) from/with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick memorable? To jog your memory Clinton said: “That’s not change you can believe in, that’s change you can Xerox.”

Next question. Do you remember Clinton saying more frequently she agreed with Obama or Obama saying more frequently that he agreed with Clinton? Your answer, based on your recollection of the debate is more important than the actual answer (which, to be honest, The Bourbon Room doesn’t have).

The related question is this: Generally, considering the current context of the race and Obama’s 11 straight victories (Obama won the Democrats Abroad primary today), does Clinton agreement with Obama on issues do more for Obama than his agreement with her on issues?

Question: Does it matter to you that in a 2003 questionnaire, Obama said he favored normalizing relations with Cuba (http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/12/sweet_column_obamas_2003_iviip.html), but tonight said he would not normalize relations with Cuba unless it pursues human rights and democratic reforms.

Question: Do you think the gap between Clinton and Obama narrowed or expanded on whether the next president should negotiate directly with U.S. enemies such Cuba, Iran and North Korea?

Question: Can you remember a significant difference that emerged in nearly 10 minutes of debate over how to revive the U.S. economy?

Question: Do you understand the difference between Clinton and Obama on the pursuit of universal health care coverage? Does it strike you as an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin difference or a crucial philosophical divide?

Question: Do you agree or disagree with Obama’s assertion the Iraq troop surge represents a “tactical victory” that is hopelessly ensnared in major “strategic blunder”?

Question: Do you believe Obama’s surge answer, if he’s the Democratic nominee, will be viewed as one of strength in the inevitable Iraq debates with Sen. John McCain?

Question: Which is the logical sequence in a republic as politically complex as ours: change then solutions, or solutions then change?

Question: Did Obama look to you more or less presidential than in the previous 18 debates?

Question: Did you think Clinton faced the hardest debate of this campaign in light of her poor post-Super Tuesday performances and, as such, deserves higher marks for pluck, poise and determination?

Question: Did either Obama or Clinton answer the final “crisis” question and does that matter to you?

The answers are yours. The election is yours, especially in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont on March 4 (remember Texans, early voting is occurring NOW).

Terry McAullife’s thoughts Super Tuesday evening

Upon receiving unignorable orders from the FOX News Webmasters (you don’t mess with these people!), I happily and joyously produced this Super Tuesday primer with the able assistance of producer/videographer Anita Siegfriedt. Click below to analyze Super Tuesday with The Bourbon Room at 75 mph.