Obama-for-prez sucks air out of room for every Dem prez candidate except Hillary

Early ‘Maybe’ From Obama Jolts ’08 Field -- by ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON — Senator Barack Obama ’s announcement that he might run for president is altering the early dynamics of the 2008 Democratic nominating contest. The move has created complications for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as she steps up her own preparations and is posing a threat to lesser-known Democrats trying to position themselves as alternatives to Mrs. Clinton, Democrats said Sunday.

The declaration six weeks ago by Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, has set off a surge of interest in Democratic circles, which party officials expect will only be fueled in the coming week as Mr. Obama prepares for a day of campaignlike events in New Hampshire next Sunday.

At the least, Mr. Obama’s very high-profile explorations have contributed to a quickening of the pace across the 2008 Democratic field. On Sunday, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana said that he would create a presidential exploratory committee this week. And Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa went so far as to announce his candidacy two years before Election Day, in what his aides said was a calculated strategy to grab a moment of attention before Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton blot out the sun.

Mrs. Clinton has been meeting in recent days with New York Democrats — including a two-hour brunch on Sunday at the Manhattan apartment of Gov.-elect Eliot Spitzer — to telegraph her own likely entry into the race, though her aides said the get-together had been planned before Mr. Obama discussed his possible run publicly.

But more than simply picking up the pace, Democrats increasingly believe that Mr. Obama has the potential of upending the dynamics of the 2008 contest more than any other Democrat who might run — short, perhaps, of Al Gore , the former vice president, whom some Democrats are pressing to run.

In Mr. Obama, Democrats have a prospective candidate who both underlines and compensates for the potential weaknesses that worry many Democrats about Mrs. Clinton.

He is a fervent opponent of the war in Iraq, and Democrats see him as an exceedingly warm campaigner with a compelling personality and a striking ability to command a crowd. He has no known major political baggage (though he has yet to encounter anything approaching the level of scrutiny Mrs. Clinton has undergone during her years in public life). And Mr. Obama can even match Mrs. Clinton’s arresting political storyline if he tries to became the nation’s first black president as she seeks to become its first female president.

But whatever complications he might pose for Mrs. Clinton are dwarfed by the shadow he is throwing over lesser-known Democrats. Almost without exception, they have approached this race with the same strategy: to try to emerge as the alternative to Mrs. Clinton and take advantage of substantial reservations in Democratic circles about her potential to win the White House.

There is only so much money, seasoned political expertise and media attention to go around, so the prospect of Mr. Obama eyeing the presidential nomination is understandably unsettling to his potential rivals. Whereas their original success was contingent on Mrs. Clinton folding, now they face the prospect of having to hope that two high-profile national Democrats collapse in the year leading into the Iowa caucuses.

“For every candidate in the race who isn’t Hillary Clinton, the entry of any other candidate in the races makes your job that much harder,” said Ron Klain, who worked as a senior adviser for Mr. Gore when he ran for president. “For all those guys, Obama is a very serious candidate who will compete with them for the limited supply of activists and media attention.”

Mark McKinnon, who was a top adviser to President Bush in his two White House runs and who is a senior adviser to Senator John McCain , Republican of Arizona and a likely presidential candidate in 2008, said, “I think Barack Obama is the most interesting persona to appear on the political radar screen in decades.” He added, “He’s a walking, talking hope machine, and he may reshape American politics.”

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said, “If you believe at some level that this is a zero-sum game in terms of money and supporters and talent, then any time someone gets in with a big excitement quotient, that affects everybody else.” Mr. Axelrod has worked for Mr. Vilsack and for John Edwards , the former North Carolina senator who ran for president in 2004 and is likely to do so again this time.

Mr. Bayh got a reminder of that on Sunday when he appeared on “This Week” on ABC.

“What kind of a strategy do you need to combat huge political celebrities like John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton?” asked George Stephanopoulos , the program’s host.

Mr. Bayh earnestly dodged the question for a moment, before finally responding: “Is this a little bit like David and Goliath? A little bit, but as I recall, David did O.K.”

Asked repeatedly about the woman who is perceived as his most formidable challenge in the primary, Mr. Obama has been careful not to criticize Mrs. Clinton directly. But one of his central messages is that he is something Mrs. Clinton is not: a late baby boomer (he was born in 1961, at the tail end of the post-World War II generation; Mrs. Clinton was born in 1947), and a fresh face that rises above old partisan grudges.

Mr. Obama has already provided some hints of how he would position himself against Mrs. Clinton, suggesting he would link her to her husband’s presidency and their role in the intense partisanship that marked much of the 1990s and that carried over into the Bush presidency.

During a lengthy interview just before the midterm elections, Mr. Obama portrayed himself as part of a new generation of political leaders. Asked whether he detected a void in the Democratic presidential field, Mr. Obama replied that he sensed a mood of “Do we want to get beyond the slash-and-burn, highly ideological politics that bogged us down over the last several decades?”

Mr. Obama went on to say that he admired former President Bill Clinton for trying to bridge a centrist course between Democrats and Republicans . But he did not shy away from pointing out Mr. Clinton’s weaknesses — as someone who came of age in the 1960s, and all the debates about Vietnam service, drug use and sexual conduct that went with it, issues that continued to play out, sometimes with Mrs. Clinton in a supporting role.

“Although his instincts were right on target, and I think, intellectually and pragmatically, he understood that America wanted to move beyond those categories, in some ways he was trapped by his biography,” Mr. Obama said. “Some of what I say, I think, is facilitated by the fact that I’m less rooted in some of those arguments.”

For all the excitement Mr. Obama’s potential candidacy has stirred, he remains a 45-year-old first-term senator who is largely untested in national politics. Yes, Mr. Obama is unusually talented, Democrats and Republicans alike say, but the history of presidential campaigns is filled with examples of celebrity candidates like Gen. Wesley Clark in 2004 who burst onto the political stage but eventually sputtered as they struggled to master the difficulties of running for president.

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said they never figured this would be an easy race for her, should she run. They said they appreciated Mr. Obama’s political talents and the threats he posed to her candidacy — in particular, his appeal to liberal voters, given the opposition to the war, and his appeal to black voters, who have been a large part of Mrs. Clinton’s base.

It is conceivable that Mr. Obama would help Mrs. Clinton by initially commanding contributions and blocking out more experienced and tested potential rivals — like Mr. Edwards or Mr. Bayh — only to stumble later on, when it is too late for anyone else to catch up.

James Carville , a Democratic consultant who advises Mrs. Clinton, said it was impossible to predict how Mr. Obama might shape such a crowded field.

“He has an early effect on the race, but there’s no way to predict what happens in a presidential race with this many funded candidates and this kind of name recognition,” Mr. Carville said.

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers have said throughout the year that she would wait until after the midterm election before moving into the more aggressive exploration phase that she is now in. “Her decision-making process is not going to depend on what candidates do or don’t do, which isn’t to say we don’t have tremendous respect for the other candidates,” said Howard Wolfson, a Clinton adviser.

One Democrat with knowledge of Mrs. Clinton’s conversation with Mr. Spitzer on Sunday, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversation was meant to be private, said Mrs. Clinton did not tell Mr. Spitzer that she was running or ask him to commit to her possible candidacy; rather, they talked over the pros and cons of a presidential run.

Mr. Obama, who first said in October that he was considering a race for the White House, said he intended to make his decision known after the first of the year.

Other Democrats who might run include Senators Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, Joseph R. Biden of Delaware and John Kerry of Massachusetts, and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

Mr. Vilsack has been the most aggressive in trying to compensate for an expected move by Mr. Obama: the governor did a five-state announcement tour last week. “We accomplished our mission which was to make our introduction before anyone else sort of crowded in on the field,” said Jeff Link, a senior adviser to Mr. Vilsack.

(Anne E. Kornblut and Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting from Washington, and Patrick Healy from New York.)