WASHINGTON — Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton reached for the finish line of contentious Ohio and Texas primary campaigns on Monday as senior Democrats expressed concern the party could suffer this fall if their struggle goes much longer.
Meanwhile, Arizona Sen. John McCain was poised Monday to clinch the Republican nomination today as his rival, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, barnstormed across Texas, refusing to concede the race is all but over.
“I’m just getting warmed up,” said Clinton, looking beyond this week’s contests and shrugging off 11 straight primary and caucus defeats as well as a three-digit deficit in delegates.
The New York senator and former first lady campaigned in Ohio, where she accused Obama of double talk on NAFTA, and Texas.
The Illinois senator spent his day in Texas, a state rich in military bases, where he pledged to begin the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq next year and envisioned a “seamless transition from active duty to civilian life” for men and women who leave the armed forces.
But Obama was shadowed by allegations that he had overstated his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement to win votes back in Ohio. He told reporters his campaign never gave Canada back-channel assurances that his criticism of NAFTA, which is wildly unpopular in Ohio, amounted to political posturing.
“Nobody reached out to the Canadians to try to assure them of anything,” he said in Carrollton, Texas.
In addition to Texas and Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont hold primaries today. The four races have a total of 370 national convention delegates at stake.
Obama has won 11 straight contests, and leads in the Associated Press delegate count, 1,386-1,276. His margin is greater among delegates chosen in the primaries and caucuses, 1,187-1,035, while Clinton leads among party officials, known as superdelegates, 241-199.
Slightly more than 600 delegates will remain to be picked in primaries and caucuses in 10 states after this week’s primaries. Pennsylvania is the biggest state remaining, with 158 delegates in a primary on April 22.
But senior Democrats have begun to speak out in private as well as public about the effect a continuation of the bruising campaign might have in a fall confrontation with Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee-in-waiting.
Several Democrats said the party’s chairman, Howard Dean, told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week he was concerned about the possibility of a nominating campaign that stretched through the end of the primaries in early June. Dean also said that if the party is divided going into the summer’s convention, it would remain that way afterward, these officials said.
On the Republican side, despite an essentially insurmountable lead in delegates McCain said, “I still respect the right of Gov. Huckabee to stay in the race as long as he wants to.”
McCain has 1,014 delegates to the Republican National Convention, according to a tally by the Associated Press. To secure the nomination, he must win 1,191. The primaries in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont today will award 256 delegates, giving McCain the possibility of wrapping up the GOP nomination.
In an e-mail to supporters, campaign manager Rick Davis predicted: “With wins in these states, John McCain will go ‘over the top’ and secure enough delegates to win the Republican nomination for President of the United States.”
Huckabee mocked party officials who have urged him to step aside, saying the election is not yet over. “Texans are a stubbornly independent people,” he told a rally in Dallas on Monday. “You don’t tell ‘em what they’re going to do.”
“If (Huckabee) wins Texas, you know, John McCain can’t get all 1,191 delegates,” said actor Chuck Norris, who introduced Huckabee to the crowd at Southern Methodist University.
Should Clinton give up?
Two-thirds of Democrats say a victory in either Ohio or Texas would be reason enough for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., to keep her historic bid for the party’s presidential nomination alive, according to a new Washington Post-ABC news poll.
Two losses, however, would dramatically change the equation. Only 29 percent of Democrats said Clinton should drop out if she loses one of the two big states, but that number spikes to 51 percent if she were to lose both.
The Washington Post
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