Senator Barack Obama made history on Tuesday, capturing the Democratic White House nomination as the first black candidate atop a major-party ticket, after a giant-slaying win over Senator Hillary Clinton.
“America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past,” Obama said even as Clinton, on her own quest to be the first female president, refused to formally concede defeat.
“Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States,” Obama said, in one of the final acts of the longest, most expensive and spellbinding nominating epic ever.
The Illinois senator’s momentous victory set up an intriguing general election clash with the 71-year-old Republican senator, John McCain.
On Nov. 4, voters must pick between Obama, a freshman senator and charismatic mixed-race standard-bearer of a new political generation, and McCain, a Vietnam War veteran asking for one final call to service.
Clinton congratulated Obama on an “extraordinary” race but refused to bow out, demanding respect for the nearly 18 million people who voted for her and leaving no doubt that she considered herself the best potential president.
“The question is, where do we go from here, and given how far we’ve come and where we need to go as a party, it’s a question I don’t take lightly,” the 60-year-old New York senator said.
“This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight,” she said.
Obama paid lavish tribute to Clinton.
“She’s a leader who inspires millions of Americans with her strength, her courage and her commitment to the causes that brought us here tonight,” he told 19,000 supporters packed inside the stadium in St Paul.
“Our party and our country are better off because of her, and I am a better candidate for having had the honor to compete with Hillary Rodham Clinton,” he said.
Obama’s soaring calls of hope and change, in a country wearied by the Iraq War and stalked by fears of recession, ended a 16-year era of Clinton family dominance over the Democratic Party.
He claimed victory capturing the final primary in Montana and after a flood of party superdelegates during the day, vaulted over the winning post of 2,118 delegates to the party’s August nominating convention.
Clinton snapped up a consolation victory in South Dakota’s primary, taking 55 percent of votes to Obama’s 45 percent. In Montana, results showed Obama with 56 percent to Clinton’s 41 percent.
Five months before the election, Obama had a 49 percent to 44 percent lead over McCain in a USA Today/Gallup poll, with their battle already boiling over Iraq, whether to talk to US enemies like Iran and the ailing US economy.
In the frenzied end-game, Clinton said for the first time she may be ready to serve as Obama’s vice president, in a phone call with lawmakers from New York state, a staffer said.
Obama needs Clinton’s army of white working-class, women and Hispanic voters, but some analysts question whether he wants to associate himself so closely to the Clinton political legacy.
Obama turned his full fire on McCain on Tuesday, with a daring foray into the same Minnesota sports arena where Republicans will crown their nominee in September.
“It is not change when John McCain decided to stand with George Bush 95 percent of the time, as he did in the Senate last year,” he said.
“John McCain has spent a lot of time talking about trips to Iraq in the last few weeks, but maybe if he spent some time taking trips to the cities and towns that have been hardest hit by this economy ... he’d understand the kind of change that people are looking for,” he said.
Obama rocketed to prominence at the 2004 Democratic presidential convention with an electrifying call for unity, proclaiming “there is not a Black America and a White America ... there’s the United States of America.”
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