WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Barack Obama took a big step toward the Democratic presidential nomination with an easy victory in North Carolina on Tuesday, and Hillary Clinton vowed to keep her struggling campaign alive after narrowly winning Indiana.
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US Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama speaks to supporters at his North Carolina and Indiana primary election night rally in Raleigh, North Carolina May 6, 2008. (REUTERS/Ellen Ozier) |
The results helped Obama widen his lead over Clinton in the grueling Democratic duel for the right to face Republican John McCain in November’s presidential election with just six nominating contests remaining.
Both candidates looked ahead to contests next week in West Virginia and May 20 in Oregon and Kentucky, but Clinton was nearly out of opportunities to change the course of the race.
“We have seen that it’s possible to overcome the politics of division and distraction, that it’s possible to overcome the same old negative attacks that are always about scoring points and never about solving our problems,” Obama said at a victory rally in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The Illinois senator’s 14-point victory in North Carolina was a dramatic comeback from a difficult campaign stretch that began last month with a big loss in Pennsylvania and was prolonged by the controversy over racially charged comments by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Obama, 46, sounded like he was already focused on the general election showdown with McCain. “This fall, we intend to march forward as one Democratic Party, united by a common vision for this country,” said Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president.
The results meant Clinton missed her best chance to narrow Obama’s lead in pledged delegates who will help pick the nominee at August’s convention. She won Indiana by just 23,000 votes out of more than 1.25 million votes cast in the state, but promised to keep up the fight.
“It’s full speed on to the White House,” Clinton said at a victory rally in Indianapolis, with her husband former President Bill Clinton standing behind her. “We’ve got a long road ahead, but we’re going to keep fighting.”
Clinton, a 60-year-old New York senator and former first lady who would be the country’s first woman president, asked the Indianapolis crowd for donations to keep alive her campaign, which has been heavily outspent by Obama.
Early on Wednesday Clinton was to head West Virginia where polls show she is in the lead ahead of that state’s May 13 contest. “For too long, we’ve let places like West Virginia and Kentucky slip out of the Democratic column … I intend to win them in November in the general election,” she said on Tuesday.
OBAMA WIDENS LEAD IN DELEGATES
An MSNBC count showed Obama expanded his delegate edge by a net of nine in the two states. Obama now has 1,876 total delegates to Clinton’s 1,729, still short of the 2,025 needed to clinch the nomination.
But neither candidate can win without help from super delegates — nearly 800 party insiders and officials who are free to back any candidate — and the results on Tuesday undermined Clinton’s argument that she is the candidate with the best chance to beat McCain in November.
With just 217 delegates at stake in the last six contests, Clinton has no realistic chance to overtake Obama’s lead in pledged delegates or in popular votes won in the state-by-state battle for the nomination that began in January.
“We’re nearing the finish line,” Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod told reporters. “I think we’ve taken another big step down the road here to ending this contest and beginning the general election campaign.”
Clinton still hopes to find a way to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida, where she won contests in January that are not recognized by the national party because of a dispute over when they were held.
Clinton’s campaign said the race was far from over.
“They’ve been trying to wrap up this nomination over the will of the voters for a long time, and it hasn’t worked,” said Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee. “There’s a funny thing about democracy. Voters like to have a say.”
Exit polls showed the faltering U.S. economy, which has increasingly preoccupied voters around the country, was the top issue for two-thirds of Indiana voters and about 6 of every 10 voters in North Carolina.
In the last week, the two Democrats had courted working- and middle-class voters suffering from an ailing economy and high gas prices and battled over Clinton’s proposal to lift the federal gasoline tax for the summer.
(Additional reporting by Caren Bohan and Jeff Mason)
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