Clinton, Obama already eyeing March 4

Courting Hispanics
In Dallas, potential Clinton supporters piled into wood-paneled booths at Metro Grill to watch Super Tuesday returns and snack on fried red onion strings.

Clinton herself scheduled personal appearances Tuesday and Wednesday in El Paso, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and McAllen, all predominantly Latino cities where her husband, the former president, is so popular his portrait hangs in many Mexican restaurants.

Obama is relatively new to Texans but held two well-attended rallies in the past year in Austin, the state's most liberal city. He's also been lining up notable supporters in Houston and Dallas. Obama has time to catch up, said Lydia Camarillo, vice president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in San Antonio. "The Hispanic vote is Hillary's right now. But he's made some gains."

Some Latino voters could be swayed by Obama's support from the Kennedy family, said political science professor Jerry Polinard at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg. But Polinard added, "He's going to have difficulty cracking her stranglehold on the Latino vote."

In Ohio, bus loads of activists and their friends and neighbors rolled into Columbus' Harrison Park Center to hear how they could help Obama in Ohio. More than 500 came; the room inside was set up with 120 chairs.

"The good news, if you're running the Obama campaign, is there's a lot of energy there and people are ready to work," said Ed Helvey, chairman of Ohio's Delaware County Democratic Party who visited the meeting.

"The bad news? They had their first real big meeting a month out."

Picking the president: The candidates Click to visit that candidate's MSNBC page or click the XML symbol for an RSS feed. John McCain                Barack Obama

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