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Senior US senator calls for Clinton to drop out of race

A veteran US senator is calling for Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton to abandon the race for the sake of the party, while rival Barack Obama has harvested an unexpected endorsement from a moderate Pennsylvania senator three weeks before the state primary.

Senator Patrick Leahy, an Obama supporter, chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee and six-term lawmaker from the tiny northeastern state of Vermont, became the first senior member of the upper chamber of the US Congress to publicly recommend Clinton drop out of the race.

"Senator Clinton has every right, but not a very good reason, to remain a candidate for as long as she wants to. As far as the delegate count and the interests of a Democratic victory in November go, there is not a very good reason for drawing this out," Leahy said in a statement issued on Friday.

Campaigning in Indiana, Clinton said Leahy was wrong.

"There are millions of reasons to continue this race: people in Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina and all of the contests yet to come," Clinton said. "This is a very close race and clearly I believe strongly that everyone should have their voices heard and their votes counted."

Leahy said Obama's delegate lead appears to be insurmountable and noted the endorsement by Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey signaled the race had clearly turned in Obama's favor.

The latest Gallup tracking poll, meanwhile, showed Obama with a 50-42 lead over Clinton. That ties his largest lead in the survey since early January.

Casey's endorsement was unexpected and could boost to Obama's standing with Catholic voters, who make up more than 30 percent of the state, and among working-class voters known as "Casey Democrats."

Campaigning in Pennsylvania, Obama said on Friday he would return the US to the more "traditional" foreign policy efforts of past presidents.

"The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan, and it is George Bush that's been naive and it's people like John McCain and, unfortunately, some Democrats that have facilitated him acting in these naive ways that have caused us so much damage in our reputation around the world," he said.

Obama faced criticism in January from Clinton for saying Reagan changed the trajectory of US politics and that Republicans had been the party of ideas for the last decade or more.
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