WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama effectively clinched the Democratic presidential nomination Tuesday, based on an Associated Press tally of convention delegates, becoming the first black candidate ever to lead his party into a fall campaign for the White House.
Campaigning on an insistent call for change, Obama outlasted former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in a historic race that sparked record turnout in primary after primary, yet exposed deep racial divisions within the party.
The AP tally was based on public commitments from delegates as well as more than a dozen private commitments. It also included a minimum number of delegates Obama was guaranteed even if he lost the final two primaries in South Dakota and Montana later in the day.
The 46-year-old first term senator will face Sen. John McCain of Arizona in the fall campaign to become the 44th president.
Clinton was ready to concede that her rival had amassed the delegates needed to triumph, according to officials in her campaign. These officials said the New York senator did not intend to suspend or end her candidacy in a speech Tuesday night in New York. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to divulge her plans.
Obama's triumph was fashioned on prodigious fundraising, meticulous organizing and his theme of change aimed at an electorate opposed to the Iraq war and worried about the economy _ all harnessed to his own innate gifts as a campaigner.
Clinton campaigned for months as the candidate of experience, a former first lady and second-term senator ready, she said, to take over on Day One.
But after a year on the trail, Obama won the kickoff Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, and the 46-year-old, first-term Illinois senator became something of an overnight political phenomenon.
''We came together as Democrats, as Republicans and independents, to stand up and say we are one nation, we are one people and our time for change has come,'' he said that night in Des Moines.
A video produced by Will I. Am and built around Obama's ''Yes, we can'' rallying cry quickly went viral. It drew its one millionth hit within a few days of being posted.
Posted 06/ 3/2008 Clinton:Will Do 'Whatever it Takes' to Elect a Democrat
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) said she was willing to do "whatever it takes" to elect a Democrat in the fall in response to a question from Rep. Nydia Velasquez about the vice presidency during a recently completed conference call with the New York congressional delegation.
Velasquez, a prominent Clinton supporter and Latina, voiced concern that without Clinton on the national ticket, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) might not be able to win the Hispanic vote in the numbers required to claim the presidency, according to someone on the call.
Clinton did not directly address the idea of serving as Obama's second in command, but did make clear that she would do whatever was required of her to help elect a Democrat to the White House in November.
It is the second time in the last few days that Clinton failed to bat down speculation that she may be interested in serving as vice president. In a phone interview with the Post's Anne Kornblut over the weekend, Clinton dodged when asked whether her husband --former President Bill Clinton -- was working behind the scenes to get her on the national ticket.
"I do not believe that is happening," she said. "It's not -- you know, I'm not aware of it."
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, it's important to remember that refusing to rule out the possibility of serving as vice president is not at all the same as saying you are actively interested in the job.
Our sense is that Clinton wants to preserve as many options as possible at this point, but has not thought seriously about what the future holds for her politically just yet. Clinton said as much on the call, noting that she is focused entirely on the primaries in South Dakota and Montana today.
For Clinton, figuring out her next move will be the work of the next few days. Aides to the senator insist there has been no talk of what's next for her as she has focused exclusively on a day-to-day sort of campaign over the last few months.
Clinton is clearly aware that she holds considerable power -- still -- within the Democratic party, having won more than 17 million votes as well as strong majorities among key groups like Latinos and working-class voters in the Rust Belt.
Regardless of whether she winds up on the Democratic ticket, Clinton is almost certain to be an active presence on the campaign trail for Obama as well as other Democratic candidates for House, Senate and governor. Such a level of activity is likely to help rehabilitate her image within the party among those who have felt alienated from her during this protracted primary campaign. It will also build up considerable good will for her among elected officials for whatever opportunities she pursues in the future.
Obama seals nomination Candidate’s moment a juncture in U.S. history BY ADAM GELLER The Associated Press
The principle that all men are created equal has never been more than a remote eventuality in the quest for the presidency. But with the Democratic nomination finally in Barack Obama’s grasp, that ideal is no longer relegated to someday. Someday is now. It is a history-making moment — though Obama is not necessarily the candidate many might have expected to make that history. He is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas. He’s too young to remember the civil rights struggle, let alone to have been a soldier in the fight. “He was impossible to anticipate,” says Shola Lynch, director of a documentary about the 1972 campaign waged by Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the New Yorker who was the first black woman to vie for the presidency. In a country whose self-identity has been warped by racial prejudice since the beginning, this moment has taken an eternity to arrive. Or, viewed over the spectrum of a long, painful history, relatively little time at all. After all, it has been just 45 years since Martin Luther King declared his dream for a colorblind America, just over 30 years since Mississippi disbanded the sovereignty commission that fought to maintain segregation and deny blacks their rights. Other notable black candidates have run for the highest office. Some waged serious campaigns that, at least when it came to the prospect of winning the nomination, were never taken seriously. “I grew up and matured in the height of the civil rights movement and there was no thought then of a black man being president of the United States. We had barely begun to vote then,” says Ronald Walters, who served as deputy director of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s run for the presidency in 1984. “It was hard for us, even in the Jackson campaign, to get our arms around this, the fact that there would be a black president of the United States — even though we were running,” says Walters, now a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. But even as they marvel at Obama’s rise, Walters and others say it will take time to appraise what it says about the nation’s political and cultural state of mind. Can he be elected? How long will it take before other viable black candidates — not to mention women — compete for the presidency? Obama’s likely nomination is a milestone, but it is not at all clear where that marker is posted. His ascendance could prove to be a fairly isolated event, the creation of extraordinary coincidences or something more. “The nation has come a long way” when a major party demonstrates its support for a presidential nominee who is not a white male, says Thomas J. Davis, author of the book “Race Relations in America” and a professor of history at Arizona State University. But “what does it tell us aside from that fact, which we can see right before our eyes?” Some may see Obama’s success as marking a revolution in the politics of race. In fact, it’s the latest incremental step — albeit the most noticeable one — in a gradual evolution. By the early 1960s, pressure was building. Activists clashed with police in Selma, Ala., in a historymaking demand for the right to vote. Congress passed the National Voting Rights Act to eliminate the literacy tests many Southern States used to keep black voters from the polls. That led to much greater black voter participation and the first significant entry of black candidates and office holders. Change came, but slowly. In 1965, Massachusetts voters chose Edward Brooke for a Senate seat, but it wasn’t until 1993 that another black candidate was elected to the chamber. In 1972, Chisholm, a New York congresswoman, became the fi rst black woman to pursue the presidency, waging a campaign to end the Vietnam War and give voice to the silent in the nation’s policymaking. Jesse Jackson followed in 1984 and 1988, paving the way for the candidacies of Alan Keyes, Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun. Still, it wasn’t until 1989 that Virginia made L. Douglas Wilder the nation’s first black elected governor. A majority of Americans said the country was ready for a black president, but that was far from making it reality. “The fact is that there were no African-Americans who were in a position to run for president at that time so what people would say was really pretty irrelevant,” said David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank focused on issues important to black Americans. Voters did not really begin to contemplate the idea of a black president as anything beyond an abstract until the 1990s when Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff during the Gulf War, gained wide admiration. Now, the irony of Obama’s achievement is that much of what it represents is not about the color of his skin. Obama, at 46 too young to remember the civil rights era, has run a race that, at least when possible, has been deliberately not about race. He steered clear of a campaign like Jesse Jackson’s, which shaped itself as a fight for the rights of minorities and the poor. Instead, he promised an era of change, an idea that found broad support among different groups of voters. He excluded many of the civil rights leaders and others — from Jackson to Al Sharpton — who would have defined him as a black candidate. He spoke about himself not primarily as a black man but as a man whose story was uniquely American. “Was it about race? No, it was about electability,” Walters said. “The racial aspect of his agenda is missing, the racial politics are missing. So really all you have left is the symbol of the person.” The result is a prospective nominee whose candidacy is weighted with the possibility of cultural significance, but maybe not in the way that might have been imagined. It is less a testament to rising black political fortunes than to the power of a fast-changing social dynamic. In the ranks of black politics, the baton is being passed from leaders rooted in the fight for civil rights and social activism to a new group of young, educated and energized politicians with their own point of view. CHRIS CARLSON/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Sen. Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, arrive for a rally in St. Paul, Minn., on Tuesday.
Hillary must be waiting for the big 'ask out on a date' for the VP spot......now if only one of them were gay.....although if I were married to President Billy maybe I would be.......
if Hillary holds her own the 'girls' will be proud of her......and then she will be elected in 4years......
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Obama Was Selected, Not Elected by Ann Coulter (more by this author) Posted 06/04/2008 ET Updated 06/04/2008 ET
Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago.
When Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election by half a percentage point, but lost the Electoral College -- or, for short, "the constitutionally prescribed method for choosing presidents" -- anyone who denied the sacred importance of the popular vote was either an idiot or a dangerous partisan.
But now Hillary has won the popular vote in a Democratic primary, while Obambi has won under the rules. In a spectacular turnabout, media commentators are heaping sarcasm on our plucky Hillary for imagining the "popular vote" has any relevance whatsoever.
It's the exact same situation as in 2000, with Hillary in the position of Gore and Obama in the position of Bush. The only difference is: Hillary has a much stronger argument than Gore ever did (and Hillary's more of a man than Gore ever was).
Unbeknownst to liberals, who seem to imagine the Constitution is a treatise on gay marriage, our Constitution sets forth rules for the election of a president. Under the Constitution that has led to the greatest individual liberty, prosperity and security ever known to mankind, Americans have no constitutional right to vote for president, at all. (Don't fret Democrats: According to five liberals on the Supreme Court, you do have a right to sodomy and abortion!)
Americans certainly have no right to demand that their vote prevail over the electors' vote.
The Constitution states that electors from each state are to choose the president, and it is up to state legislatures to determine how those electors are selected. It is only by happenstance that most states use a popular vote to choose their electors.
When you vote for president this fall, you will not be voting for Barack Obama or John McCain; you will be voting for an elector who pledges to cast his vote for Obama or McCain. (For those new Obama voters who may be reading, it's like voting for Paula, Randy or Simon to represent you, instead of texting your vote directly.)
Any state could abolish general elections for president tomorrow and have the legislature pick the electors. States could also abolish their winner-take-all method of choosing presidential electors -- as Nebraska and Maine have already done, allowing their electors to be allocated in proportion to the popular vote. And of course there's always the option of voting electors off the island one by one.
If presidential elections were popular vote contests, Bush might have spent more than five minutes campaigning in big liberal states like California and New York. But under a winner-take-all regime, close doesn't count. If a Republican doesn't have a chance to actually win a state, he may as well lose in a landslide. Using the same logic, Gore didn't spend a lot of time campaigning in Texas (and Walter Mondale campaigned exclusively in Minnesota).
Consequently, under both the law and common sense, the famed "popular vote" is utterly irrelevant to presidential elections. It would be like the winner of "Miss Congeniality" claiming that title also made her "Miss America." Obviously, Bush might well have won the popular vote, but he would have used a completely different campaign strategy.
By contrast, there are no constitutional rules to follow with party primaries. Primaries are specifically designed by the parties to choose their strongest candidate for the general election.
Hillary's argument that she won the popular vote is manifestly relevant to that determination. Our brave Hillary has every right to take her delegates to the Democratic National Convention and put her case to a vote. She is much closer to B. Hussein Obama than the sainted Teddy Kennedy was to Carter in 1980 when Teddy staged an obviously hopeless rules challenge at the convention. (I mean rules about choosing the candidate, not rules about crushed ice at after-parties.)
And yet every time Hillary breathes a word about her victory in the popular vote, TV hosts respond with sneering contempt at her gaucherie for even mentioning it. (Of course, if popularity mattered, networks like MSNBC wouldn't exist. That's a station that depends entirely on "superviewers.")
After nearly eight years of having to listen to liberals crow that Bush was "selected, not elected," this is a shocking about-face. Apparently unaware of the new party line that the popular vote amounts to nothing more than warm spit, just last week HBO ran its movie "Recount," about the 2000 Florida election, the premise of which is that sneaky Republicans stole the presidency from popular vote champion Al Gore. (Despite massive publicity, the movie bombed, with only about 1 million viewers, so now HBO is demanding a "recount.")
So where is Kevin Spacey from HBO's "Recount," to defend Hillary, shouting: "WHO WON THIS PRIMARY?"
In the Democrats' "1984" world, the popular vote is an unconcept, doubleplusungood verging on crimethink. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Unless Obama takes Hillary as his VP, he won't have a shot at the presidency. (he/she won't get my vote anyway). But he will never make it without her followers. The majority spoke. And it is clear that the majority would rather have a woman presidential candidate than a black man that listened to anti-American hate speech for 20 years. Right or wrong, that's what it came down to.
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
How come we haven't heard about anything like what's stated in the video from any of our liberal media or are they going to suppress the truth until it's too late. Anyone with those beliefs shouldn't even be able to run for a political office.
How come we haven't heard about anything like what's stated in the video from any of our liberal media or are they going to suppress the truth until it's too late. Anyone with those beliefs shouldn't even be able to run for a political office.
War and Obama by Bill O'Reilly (more by this author) Posted 06/07/2008 ET
Cutting through all the fog, there are two primary reasons behind Barack Obama's stunning victory over the Clinton machine: authenticity and the war in Iraq.
As amply demonstrated, there is simply no comparison between Obama and Hillary Clinton as far as public speaking is concerned. He is eloquent and natural, talking directly to the folks. She is more stilted and rehearsed, talking at the listener. Sen. Clinton comes across as the typical politician, while Sen. Obama seems like a genuine human being.
He also outflanked her on the Iraq war. In the beginning of the campaign, Obama bolted from the starting gate flashing his anti-war cred. From the jump, he had been against the action. And now he was the guy who would pull the USA out of the Iraq swamp.
Clinton was immediately put on the defensive, as she initially supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein. Also, her entire outlook on confronting Islamic fascism was far too bullish for far-left America. So the Net roots, as they call themselves, flocked to Obama and provided him with vast amounts of money via the Internet. By the time Hillary rallied Democratic moderates, it was too late.
Now Obama has achieved the nomination, but his winning primary strategy on Iraq could come back to haunt him in the general election, when the far left becomes rather insignificant. Already John McCain is painting Obama as a terror appeaser who would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq.
And McCain has some heavy ammunition to back up his attack. In May, American casualties were the lowest since the Iraq war began in 2003. In addition, Iraqi oil production is now at its highest level since Saddam fell. Even the liberal Reuters news agency calls the current situation in Iraq a "dramatic turnabout."
Of course, you won't hear much about that in the American press, as the liberal media have much invested in a U.S. defeat in Iraq. But there is no question that the war there can now be won. It's not a lock, but it's certainly a possibility.
McCain must make the case that a victory in Iraq, which means the country stabilizes and becomes an ally against Islamic terror and Iran, means a much more secure United States. For the past few weeks, McCain has been spotlighting Iran's villainy; pointing out its support of terror groups like Hezbollah and its outright killing of our forces in Iraq.
Quietly, McCain is setting Obama up for a hard right to the jaw. If the U.S. pulls out of Iraq too quickly, the pressure on Iran immediately lightens and the potential for aggression by the bitterly anti-Jewish and anti-American Mullahs rises dramatically. Does Obama understand that? Does it matter to him? McCain will confront his young challenger with those questions.
Obama's advisers know the Iraq scenario is changing fast. They also understand that the media will ignore the good news for as long as it can. But word will get out and, after years of frustration, Americans could be staring at a success story after all. Not good news for Obama.
Hillary Clinton didn’t lose the nomination to Barack Obama, she was beaten by a team of political strategists led by the brilliant David Axelrod, who understood better than anyone else the arcane rule changes the Democratic Party made to kick-start outsider campaigns after Jesse Jackson’s campaign faltered. However, these rule changes don’t carry over to the final election, where votes are counted differently. I hope Sen. Clinton will campaign strongly for Democratic nominee Obama because as a nation we can’t afford four more years of Republican rule. But I’m not sure she should be marginalized as vice president. There are other positions where she’ll be more effective, including becoming the “Grande Dame of the Senate.” I’m proud of Hillary Clinton, and I wish her well no matter what she decides to do in the future. MELINDA PERRIN Scotia
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