Headlines, North America

POLITICS: Obama Victory Resonates in Race-Conscious U.S.

Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON, Jun 4 2008 (IPS) - "Tonight I can stand here and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for the president of the United States of America," Sen. Barack Obama told a crowd of supporters in St. Paul, Minnesota Tuesday, bringing an effective close to a 16-month Democratic primary process.

With the last votes cast and the candidates splitting the South Dakota and Montana primaries, the Obama campaign announced a slew of superdelegate endorsements that put him beyond the delegate threshold to claim the party nomination.

Obama – the child of a black Kenyan and white woman from the U.S. state of Kansas – will become the first African-American to claim a major party nomination to the White House, generating palpable excitement in many circles that whatever happens when he faces Republican John McCain on election day in November, history has been made.

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A banner across the top of the widely-read progressive blog HuffingtonPost said simply, "HISTORIC," above a collage of newspaper front pages from across the world with headlines of Obama's victory.

A story by Washington Post staff writer NeDeen Brown examined the moment through the lens of the very phrase "black president".

"Once thought of as an oxymoron, impossible to be placed together in the same sentence, context, country – unless followed by a question mark. Black president? This Century?" wrote Brown. "And yet now, a black president seems a distinct possibility with Sen. Barack Obama heading into the general election as the Democratic presidential nominee."

Obama's chief rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, declined to drop out of the race, telling supporters in New York City, "This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight."

Both candidates spoke this morning at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual conference. Obama delivered a stem-winder that saw the crowd there exploding in rapturous applause. During her speech, Clinton seemed decidedly dejected, showing signs of wear from the campaign trail when her voice became momentarily hoarse, leading her to joke that she's been speaking too much.

Clinton's mood and weariness implied that she is resigned to having lost the race.

Despite supporters' chants of "Denver, Denver, Denver" – the site of the Democratic convention late in the summer – the Clinton camp has said that it does not intend to take the race all the way to the convention.

Pundits speculate that Clinton is holding out on dropping out to negotiate her exit for a position in the administration or backing to a different political position such as Senate majority leader. Particularly, many speculate that she covets the vice presidential slot on Obama's ticket after she said she was open to the position during a meeting with New York's congressional delegation.

But with the Obama camp unlikely to choose a vice president this far ahead of a late-August convention, the more probable scenario is that she is negotiating away the tens of millions of dollars of debt that her campaign has incurred – with a reported 11 million of it coming directly from the personal fortunes of Clinton and her husband, former Pres. Bill Clinton.

The political blog Wonkette reported that Harold Ickes, a Clinton campaign official, said that Clinton would not officially leave the race until her campaign debt had been settled.

Clinton has raised eyebrows throughout the campaign with her tough attacks against Obama, fending off charges that she and her husband were "race-baiting" as they continued to win primaries in predominately white states and repeatedly pointed out that Obama was having trouble wooing blue-collar, white voters. But over the past few weeks, Clinton has struck a more conciliatory tone.

"I want to start tonight by congratulating Senator Obama and his supporters on the extraordinary race that they have run," Clinton told her supporters last night. "It has been an honour to contest these primaries with him, just as it is an honour to call him my friend," she said, pausing to lead her crowd in a round of applause for the presumptive nominee of their party.

Just as Obama's speech was largely a general election speech, Clinton, too, used her time to go after the Republican Party and their candidate, Sen. John McCain – tying him to the policies of the last seven years of the Pres. George W. Bush administration.

Clinton has repeatedly stated that she will do everything in her power to ensure that Democrats take the White House in the November general election.

Obama, for his part, was conciliatory to Clinton during his comments – noting and lauding her long public service and particularly her work on her signature issue of healthcare reform.

"You can rest assured that when we finally win the battle for universal health care in this country, she will be central to that victory," Obama said last night in the same Minnesota arena that will host the Republican National Convention in early September.

Tuesday night and ongoing Wednesday, at the behest of a joint statement from Democratic leaders, announcements of support were made by several superdelegates – party elites whose convention votes became key to the nominating process after it became clear that neither candidate would reach the 2,118 delegate threshold on pledged primary delegates alone.

The first flurry of those endorsements came just before polls closed in Montana at around 9 PM Eastern time and put Obama over the nomination threshold, allowing him to use his speech to announce that he had become the presumptive nominee.

The flood of delegates included several superdelegates who switched their support from Clinton to Obama on the grounds of party unity in the face of her imminent demise as a candidate. A number of as-of-yet neutral superdelegates, such as highly respected African American Representative James Clyburn and former President Jimmy Carter, also came off the fence and declared for Obama Tuesday.