As Clinton fades, Obama sketches outlines of November race against McCain
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BEND, Oregon: Barack Obama turned his focus Saturday to the expected campaign against Republican John McCain as more party insiders declared their support amid mounting signs that his epic Democratic presidential nomination battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was nearing an end.
As he campaigned in Oregon, whose primary is May 20, Obama picked up four more superdelegate endorsements, erasing Clinton's once-substantial lead among the party leaders who will determine the nominee.
The milestone is important because Clinton would need to win over the superdelegates by a wide margin to claim the nomination. They are a group that Clinton owned before the leadoff Iowa caucus in early January, when she was able to cash in on the popularity of the Clinton brand among the party faithful.
Obama added superdelegates from Utah and Ohio, as well as two from the Virgin Islands who had previously backed Clinton. He had picked up nine endorsements Friday.
Superdelegates are the party and elected officials who will automatically attend the Democratic national convention this August in Denver. They can support whomever they choose, regardless of what happens in the primaries.
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They are key because the Democratic race has been so close that neither Obama nor Clinton can win the nomination without them.
"I always felt that if anybody establishes himself as the clear leader, the superdelegates would fall in line," said Don Fowler, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
"It is perceived that he is the leader," said Fowler, a superdelegate from South Carolina who supports Clinton. "The trickle is going to become an avalanche."
Saying he still has not secured the nomination, Obama nonetheless entertained several questions about the likely outlines of a contest against McCain, saying the fall election will be more about specific plans and priorities than about questions of political ideology or who is more patriotic.
Barely mentioning Clinton, Obama said he was open to campaigning with McCain in "town hall" events in which the candidates take questions from voters. But he also warned that controversial issues such as McCain's ties to the Keating Five savings and loan scandal are fair game, and he called McCain's proposal for a temporary halt this summer to the federal gasoline tax a political gimmick.
He did not mention that Clinton supports a similar plan.
Obama said McCain has received "a free pass" while he and Clinton have battled for months.
McCain, he said, "has a straight-talker image, but it's not clear that lately he's been following through on that image. I mean, this gas tax holiday was a pander. He didn't even have a way of paying for it."
The McCain campaign noted that Obama, as an Illinois state senator, once voted for a temporary gas tax suspension. Obama now says he made a mistake.
Many party leaders feel it is only a matter of time before the former first lady must concede defeat. But Clinton forged ahead Saturday, holding a fundraiser for her cash-strapped campaign in New York.
"Let's keep going, stay with me, this is a great adventure and we're going to make history," she told the crowd of several hundred people, most of them women.
She barely mentioned Obama in a speech that focused on issues like equal pay for women, only noting their differences on health care and the gas tax.
She said it would be "exciting to have the first mother in the White House."
Clinton is favored to win Tuesday's primary in West Virginia where polls show her leading Obama by as much as 40 percentage points in a state where her strongest supporters, white working-class voters, make up a substantial portion of the Democratic electorate.
But that was likely to be one of the last hurrahs for her campaign to become the first female U.S. president. Clinton has struggled to raise money in recent weeks, and was set back further last Tuesday when she squeaked by with a narrow win in Indiana while Obama won handily in North Carolina.
Clinton has repeatedly vowed to remain in the race until the last of the six remaining nominating contests is waged in early June, but Obama was already looking ahead to the general election campaign. He said he soon will campaign in Michigan and Florida, two battleground states whose Democratic primaries were essentially nullified by party disputes, angering many voters.
Speaking with reporters in Bend, Oregon, Obama brushed aside suggestions that the presidential campaign may be largely about his race, liberalism or patriotism, saving voters will have "a very clear choice on policy."
"So rather than an abstract set of questions about, 'Is he too liberal, is he too conservative, how do voters handle an African American, etcetera,' I think this is going to be a very concrete contest around very specific plans for how we improve the lives of Americans and our vision for the future," he said.
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