Obama Is Racing Against the Clock

After a heavy emphasis on the West Coast this week, Clinton will seek to maintain her national lead between now and Tuesday with a whirlwind travel schedule that extends from Missouri to Massachusetts and is capped off with a 90-minute "national town hall meeting" conducted via satellite Monday night. Her campaign also believes that, with her performance in Thursday's debate, the senator from New York moved past questions about her husband's role in the campaign and their approach to African American voters, and is now running on comfortable ground -- the issues of health care and the economy.

Still, Clinton strategists are not planning on seeing the nomination contest end on Feb. 5. They are looking ahead to March 4, when both Ohio (161 delegates) and Texas (228 delegates) vote, as the date that could be decisive.

Obama is hardly lacking for public exposure, and he is not relying only on his personal appeals to get voters to the polls. He has well-developed organizations making phone calls and home visits in nearly all of the Feb. 5 states, a growing list of prominent surrogates to campaign on his behalf, and enough money to blanket the country with television ads.

But along the trail there are signs of the ground that Obama has to make up with many voters who have had little experience in casting a meaningful vote in the primaries and have only recently trained their minds on their choices.

In Phoenix, Cynthia and Stuart Preston said that as they were driving to Obama's rally with their children, they quizzed each other to come up with three of the candidate's major platform planks. To their surprise, they couldn't think of them. Despite that, Cynthia Preston said she is supporting Obama. She was drawn, she said, by the "popular movement" behind him.

"I don't know if he has enough time to detail [his plans in all Feb. 5 states], but if you care enough, you can do the research on your own," she said.

Aware that many voters still have basic holes in their knowledge of his background, Obama is doing his best to fill them, making sure at nearly every stop to mention details such as his years as a community organizer, the death of his mother at age 53 and the fact that he is a church-going Christian, no matter what the false rumors circulated by e-mail might say. He takes time to describe the family history that led him to where he is today.

"My own family's journey moved west -- from Kansas, where my grandparents met and married, and my mother was born; to the Pacific Coast after World War II; and then across an ocean to Hawaii," he told his audience in Denver.

At that event, supporter Becky Bowman, of Lakewood, said before Obama's speech that she figured voters in Colorado could get enough information about Obama on their own. But after witnessing him bring a diverse crowd of thousands to its feet with his characteristically rousing pitch, she wondered about the shortcomings of the rushed itinerary.

Voters "need to know the magic. You can't do that through little soundbites," she said. "It's a problem."

MacGillis is traveling with the Obama campaign. Kornblut is traveling with the Clinton campaign.