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WASHINGTON — The race “is over” for Hillary Clinton, who had long been seen as the inevitable Democratic nominee seeking to become the first female US president.
Barack Obama made history by clinching the party nomination on Tuesday and becoming the first black nominee of a major U.S. political party.
Clinton has yet to acknowledge Obama’s victory in the bruising Democratic race and her aides — also dodging that conclusion — said on the morning television talk shows on Wednesday that she would take a few days to decide what comes next for her.
Clinton was angling to become Obama’s running mate and her aides ramped up the speculation on that matter.
“I think a lot of her supporters would like to see her on the ticket,” Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe said. But Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs cautioned “there is no deal in the works.”
On the final night of the primary season, Clinton won South Dakota while Obama took Montana — and a slew of party superdelegates who declared their support to help him clinch the party nod. He did it, according to The Associated Press tally, based on primary elections, state Democratic caucuses and support from superdelegates. It took 2,118 delegates to clinch the nomination at the convention in Denver this summer, and Obama had 2,144 by the AP count.
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a dogged Clinton supporter, recognized the brutality of the arithmetic, saying that the race “is over.”
Obama and Clinton were both back in Washington on Wednesday to address the national conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby group.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who ran twice for the Democratic nomination in the 1980s and made what was then historic progress for a black candidate, praised Obama’s achievement in a phone interview from Tanzania, where he is attending a meeting.
“Obama’s nomination reflects phenomenal growth in America,” Jackson told The Associated Press. “The dream of a promised land is being fulfilled.” Obama plunged ahead on a history-making quest to become the first black U.S. president, focusing on healing rifts with defeated rival Clinton and in the Democratic Party as a five-month general election matchup against Republican John McCain gets under way.
His battle against McCain, a veteran senator who effectively clinched the Republican nomination months ago, looks to be a clash of generations as well as a debate on Iraq.
Obama, 46, opposes the war; McCain, 71, is a former Vietnam prisoner of war and staunch supporter of the current U.S. military mission.
The nomination was a milestone for a nation where, just decades ago, racial discrimination was so severe blacks in some states could not eat at the same lunch counters as whites, and many had to fight just for the right to vote.
In securing the delegates needed to win, Obama completed one of the most remarkable U.S. political campaigns in memory. A first-term senator, unknown nationally four years ago, he toppled one of America’s most powerful political families.
But after all of Obama’s struggles to win over white blue-collar workers and older voters who flocked to Clinton, Rendell said he remained “a little wary” about the Illinois senator’s prospects. /AP
