A top Barack
Obama adviser urged Democrats to unite behind the Illinois
senator for the fall campaign and bring the marathon contest
for the presidential nomination to a close, but some
Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters weren't buying that
as Oregon and Kentucky held primaries Tuesday.
In a full page ad
in The New York Times, Clinton's female
supporters demanded she stay in the race despite
overwhelming odds.
''We want Hillary
to stay in this race until every vote is cast, every
vote is counted, and we know that our voices are heard,''
said the ad, paid for by the WomenCount political
action committee.
But former
senator Tom Daschle, a key Obama adviser, said now is the
time for Democrats to coalesce behind Obama in order
to defeat Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain.
''We want to
begin the process of bringing this party together, and I
think that over the last few weeks we've seen indications at
virtually all levels in both campaigns that there's a
desire to do that,'' Daschle told CBS's The Early
Show. ''That doesn't mean we're going to do it
tomorrow or the next day, but clearly there is a
desire to unify.''
Only three
primaries remain after Tuesday -- Puerto Rico on June 1 and
South Dakota and Montana on June 3.
Obama was favored
in Oregon, where supporters delivered the largest crowd
of his campaign on Sunday.
Clinton vowed
there was ''no way that this is going to end anytime soon''
as she campaigned Monday across Kentucky, a state she was
expected to win.
Polls opened in
Kentucky at 6 a.m. Eastern Daylight time, and
elections officials reported few problems.
Scott Mendel, a
54-year-old firefighter who voted at a Methodist church
in Louisville, said it was a hard decision between the two
Democratic candidates, but he chose Obama.
''It's more about
who you can trust and who can do a good job,'' Mendel
said.
Tony Clark, 61, a
real estate agent in Owensboro in western Kentucky,
said the issue that determined his vote for Clinton was
health care.
''We're at a
point in America that the one thing that is crippling us is
not gasoline, it is health care,'' Clark said. ''What we
want is the same thing the United States senators have
got. We want their program as a citizen or we want to
take away their program.''
Obama is reaching
for a symbolic tipping point in Oregon and Kentucky.
Regardless of who prevails in those states, Obama is on
track to secure the largest share of delegates who
could be won in the long slog of primaries and
caucuses since the snows of January.
If there were to
be practical dividends in that achievement, they would
come from persuading the remaining uncommitted
superdelegates -- the party insiders who are not tied
to primary or caucus results -- to pick up the pace of
their endorsements.
Enough of them
have done so in recent weeks to transform Clinton's hopes
for the nomination from improbable to worse. Obama added
another superdelegate to his column Tuesday, Guam
congressional delegate Madeleine Bordallo.
Still, the New
York senator soldiered on through event after event,
ending her night Monday in Louisville before a crowd of
several hundred, her voice raspy from the stage.
''There are a lot
of people who wanted to end this election before you
had a chance to vote,'' she said, husband and former
president Bill Clinton at her side. ''I'm ready to go
to bat for you if you'll come out and vote for me.''
Clinton planned
to spend primary night in Louisville. Obama slated a
rally for Iowa, the state of his opening electoral success,
seeking to convey a sense of closure to the Democratic
campaign .
He rarely
mentions Clinton now, except to praise her ''magnificent''
campaign -- praise he can now afford to give his rival. He
is tangling almost solely with McCain in a prelude to
the fall general campaign.
A look at some of
the numbers at play going into Tuesday's contests:
-Obama was
17 delegates short of reaching a majority of the 3,253
pledged delegates available in all state contests.
-Oregon
offered 52 delegates; Kentucky had 51.
-Counting
aligned superdelegates as well, Obama had a total of 1,917
and Clinton had 1,721, according to the latest
Associated Press count. That placed Obama just more
than 100 delegates short of the 2,026 needed to clinch
the nomination.
Democratic Party
officials are scheduled to meet last this month to
decide whether and how to count delegates from Florida and
Michigan primaries that were held in defiance of the
party's rules.
Clinton won both,
but Obama kept his name off the ballot in Michigan and
neither candidate campaigned in either state. Counting those
delegates in some way could tighten the race but not,
absent other surprises, tip the contest to Clinton.
(AP)