AP, WASHINGTON
Hillary Rodham Clinton told an exuberant crowd she wants Barack Obama to win the White House, saying that even though he dashed her presidential dream he is a better choice to lead the US than Republican John McCain.
The speech on Friday was Clinton’s first appearance at a rally for Obama since their ballyhooed June appearance together in Unity, New Hampshire, and follows news that former US president Bill Clinton, her husband and one of Obama’s toughest critics during the combative Democratic primary, will speak on the third night of the party’s national convention.
PHOTO: AFP
The developments were a further sign of a thaw in relations between Obama and the Clintons, potentially easing worries within the party that bad feelings from the grueling primary battle might erupt at the Denver convention later this month.
“Anyone who voted for me or caucused for me has so much more in common with Senator Obama than Senator McCain,” Clinton told her cheering audience in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson. “Remember who we were fighting for in my campaign.”
She said on Friday that “we may have started on two separate paths, but we are on one journey now.”
She pointed to key Democratic issues on which Obama and McCain differ — US Supreme Court nominations and health care reform, for example, as reasons that her supporters should not cross party lines.
Some of Clinton’s backers have complained loudly about the way the only female candidate was treated during the primaries.
Her supporters have succeeded in getting language into the draft of the Democratic Party platform that says, “We believe that standing up for our country means standing up against sexism and all intolerance.”
On the Republican side, the White House announced that US Vice President Dick Cheney — a conservative favorite but a divisive national figure — will speak at the Republican convention along with US President George W. Bush.
There had been doubts about a speech by Cheney, who has been unpopular with most Americans but may be helpful in shoring up the right-wing of the party for McCain, whose reputation as a maverick has worried many evangelical Christians and other Republican conservatives.
After weeks of private talks about exactly what the Clintons will do at the Democratic convention, no decision has been reached on whether delegates will actually hold a roll call vote that includes her candidacy.
Such a move could disrupt or distract from the point of the convention — showing a unified party focused on returning a Democrat to the White House.
The Clintons insist they are doing everything they can to get her supporters on board with Obama. Any reluctance, she says, is not hers, but comes from those who committed to her historic bid and are still unhappy that she did not prevail.
Clinton told reporters on Friday that the two campaigns were still in negotiations.
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