Close to securing
the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama is lavishing
attention on Florida and its wreckage of a presidential
primary while minding his manners with Hillary Rodham
Clinton -- a rival he now can afford to praise.
Obama detoured
Wednesday from the campaign for the three remaining
primaries -- Puerto Rico, Montana, South Dakota -- to rally
in a state whose renegade primary was disallowed.
Clinton, too, was in Florida, pressing to narrow her
gap with Obama by having delegates counted from its
contest in January.
Obama was just 65
delegates short of the 2,026 needed to clinch the
nomination, after another superdelegate endorsement
Wednesday and a pair of primaries the night before.
Clinton thrashed him in Kentucky; he answered by
winning Oregon.
Connecticut
representative Joe Courtney, whose district voted for
Clinton in the state's February 5 primary that was won
by Obama, padded the Illinois senator's superdelegate
lead by declaring his support. Superdelegates are
party insiders who are not tied to the outcome of
state contests.
Although Obama
won most groups of voters in Oregon, other recent
primaries including Kentucky's have been polarizing, with
large numbers of his supporters and Clinton's digging
in behind their candidate and saying they would not
vote for the other one in the fall campaign against
Republican John McCain.
''If that holds
true, then it is a problem,'' said former Colorado
senator Gary Hart, who experienced devastating party
divisions as Democrat George McGovern's campaign
manager in 1972. ''But I don't think that's going to
hold true.''
Speaking
Wednesday on CNN, he said Obama is right to have turned
recently to unifying the party and ''he has already,
wisely, I think, begun the fall campaign.''
The morning talk
shows were barren of the usual candidates or aides
trumpeting the previous night's triumph or explaining away a
loss, one sign that the rhetoric of the competition is
ratcheting down on both sides despite the trio of
primaries to come.
Indeed, Obama is
now abundant in his praise of a rival who engaged him
fiercely and often bitterly over six months. In his Iowa
rally Tuesday night, the man close to becoming the
first black Democratic presidential candidate paid
tribute to Clinton's historic effort to become the first
female president.
''You know, we've
had our disagreements during this campaign, but we all
admire her courage, and her commitment, and her
perseverance,'' he said. ''And no matter how this
primary ends, Senator Clinton has shattered myths and
broken barriers and changed the America in which my
daughters and your daughters will come of age, and for
that we are grateful to her.''
Democratic
rule-makers meet at the end of this month to decide whether
to count delegates from Florida and Michigan. Clinton
won both states but Obama had his name kept off the
Michigan ballot and neither candidate campaigned in
those states.
With 88% of the
vote counted in Oregon, Obama was winning by a 58-42
percent margin. Clinton scored a 35-point win in Kentucky
after trouncing him by 41 points in West Virginia last
week.
Obama won Oregon
with the support of men and young people, but also found
plenty of votes from blue-collar workers, who have been
a staple of Clinton victories in other states,
according to surveys of voters. As a group, only those
making less than $30,000 a year and those over 65
favored Clinton. Women were evenly divided between Obama and
Clinton, but men voted for Obama 2-to-1.
Altogether, Obama
scored a solid win in a heavily white state, a rare
achievement in recent races in which blue-collar whites have
powered his rival.
He also secured a
majority of the pledged delegates won in primaries and
caucuses across the country -- a milestone that could help
him persuade more superdelegates to endorse him.
''Tonight, in the
fullness of spring, with the help of those who stood up
from Portland to Louisville, we have returned to Iowa with a
majority of delegates elected by the American people
and you have put us within reach of the Democratic
nomination for president of the United States of
America,'' Obama said.
In Kentucky,
Clinton won two thirds of women and nearly as many men --
altogether, seven in 10 whites, who made up nearly 90% of
the electorate, exit polls indicated. Clinton
prevailed among all age, income, and education
categories, with particularly large margins among
lower-earning and less-educated voters.
Obama and Clinton
ran about even with independents, who were about one in
10 voters in Kentucky. He won a bare majority among those
who most valued "change" as a candidate attribute, but
about a quarter cited "experience" and Clinton won
nearly all of them.
As he closes in
on the Democratic prize, Obama has been concentrating his
campaign more and more on McCain rather than on Clinton.
But Clinton
insists she still sees a path to the prize by winning over
superdelegates, whose support will be needed for either
candidate to clinch the nomination.
''Neither Senator
Obama nor I will have reached that magic number when
the voting ends on June 3,'' she said Tuesday night in
Kentucky. ''And so, our party will have a tough choice
to make -- who's ready to lead our party at the top of
our ticket, who is ready to defeat Senator McCain in
the swing states and among swing voters.''
Clinton won at
least 56 delegates from Kentucky and Oregon and Obama won
at least 43, according to an analysis of election returns by
the Associated Press. All 51 delegates from Kentucky
were awarded, but there were still four of 52 to be
allocated in Oregon.
Obama has an
overall total of 1,961 delegates, including endorsements
from superdelegates. Clinton has 1,779, including
superdelegates, according to the latest tally by the
AP. (Calvin Woodward, AP)
