Senator John McCain, a one-time insurgent whose campaign was all but dead seven months ago, locked up the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday night after he defeated former Gov. Mike Huckabee in the Texas and Ohio Republican primary and Mr. Huckabee conceded the race to Mr. McCain.
Although Mr. McCain had been far ahead in the delegate count and been bestowed with the unofficial title of “likely Republican nominee” since his string of victories on Feb. 5, Tuesday’s results put him within reach of the 1,191 delegates he needs for the nomination. Mr. McCain also won the Vermont and Rhode Island primaries.
“I am very grateful and pleased to note that tonight, my friends, we have won enough delegates to claim with confidence, humility and a great sense of responsibility that I will be the Republican nominee for president of the United States,” Mr. McCain said. He said this was “an accomplishment that once seemed to more than a few doubters unlikely.”
In a sign that his party is now officially rallying around him, Mr. McCain will travel to the White House on Wednesday morning for a formal endorsement by President Bush, a Republican official said Tuesday night.
Mr. Huckabee said he called Mr. McCain to concede and offer his support.
“It looks pretty apparent tonight that he will in fact achieve 1,191 delegates to become the nominee for our party,” Mr. Huckabee said. “I extended him not only my congratulations, but my commitment to him and to the party to do everything possible to unite our party, but more importantly to unite our country so we can be the best nation we can be.”
Mr. Huckabee added, “We’ll be working on everything we can to help Senator McCain.”
Mr. McCain praised Mr. Huckabee as “a great and fine and decent American.”
The Associated Press and television networks projected that Mr. McCain won enough delegates to clinch the nomination, but The New York Times has him still short of the mark.
Tuesday’s results cleared the way for Mr. McCain to move more aggressively forward with fund-raising, building a national campaign operation and positioning himself as a general election candidate — at a time when the Democrats were fighting among themselves .
Mr. McCain’s advisers said he had a steady schedule of fund-raising through March, in New York, Palm Beach, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Denver.
Mr. McCain also has a weeklong foreign trip planned in March as part of his Senate business, but he will use it to try to promote his foreign policy credentials to voters.
The advisers said the official kick-off of the McCain campaign would be the first week of April, when Mr. McCain is planning to go on what his campaign is a calling a national “bio tour” to reintroduce himself to the country in places that have been important parts of his life: Annapolis, for example, where he graduated from the United States Naval Academy, and Naval Air Station Meridian in Mississippi, where McCain Field is named after Mr. McCain’s grandfather.
Mr. McCain spent the day campaigning across Texas, from a Mexican bakery in San Antonio to a Western-themed saloon in Houston that was heavily decorated with taxidermy, saddles and Navajo rugs to a luxury hotel ballroom in Dallas.
At every step of the way, he made clear that he hoped to clinch the nomination, but often alluded to his superstition about making predictions even touching the wood on the table in front of him during a ride through Dallas aboard his campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, when he mentioned the possibility of sewing up the Republican nomination.
Along the way he held town hall meetings — fielding questions on everything from energy policy and immigration to autism — and spoke in stark terms about the dangers in the world today, from the heightened tensions between Venezuela and Colombia to the rocket attacks into Israel that Hamas is launching from Gaza.
And he continued to chide the Democratic candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, on the North America Free Trade Agreement, implying that they were harsher in their criticism of Nafta while they campaigned in Ohio, with its struggling industrial sector, than they were while campaigning in Texas, which has benefited from trade with Mexico.
“I didn’t go to Ohio and say anything that I’m not saying here in the state of Texas,” Mr. McCain said in San Antonio. “I support Nafta, I support free trade. I support it in Ohio, I support it in Texas, I support it all over the country.”
At one point during an appearance at a Houston saloon called Goode’s Armadillo Palace (where a sign near the giant armadillo sculpture outside admonished “Gentlemen Will Behave, Others Must”) he came to the defense of Mrs. Clinton and her husband Bill.
It happened a little while after Cindy McCain, in introductory remarks, said that she thought her husband was the best prepared candidate to field an emergency phone call at the White House at 3 a.m. — implicitly drawing a contrast with Mrs. Clinton, who ran an ad suggesting that she was t best prepared for such a call.
When the event was thrown open to questions on a wide range of topics, a man in the audience took the microphone to offer his own observations. “I just wanted to observe, when you mentioned the 3 o’clock phone call, that unlike other candidates in the race, if Cindy answers the phone she won’t be wondering where her husband is,” the man said, to widespread laughter and cheers.
But Mr. McCain quieted the crowd when he immediately moved to disassociate himself from the joke. “Please let me say, sir, that Americans want us to have a respectful campaign,” he said, to applause. “I respect Senator Clinton, I respect Senator Obama, and I don’t associate myself, even though it was meant in humor.”
When Mr. McCain landed in Dallas, he was asked aboard his bus what role his age might play in the general election; should he win the race, at 71, he would be the oldest candidate elected to a first term as president. He responded by pointing to his experience and judgment, and then by seeming to question Mr. Obama’s youth by highlighting his statement from a debate last year that he would be willing to meet with the leaders of Iran and Cuba without preconditions.
“I think my major theme of this campaign is that I have the judgment to lead,” Mr. McCain said. “And you gain that ability and capability with years of experience, knowledge, background and being engaged.”
He did not name Mr. Obama, but he went on to say: “I would never announce that I was going to sit down with the president of Iran, who would then walk out of the meeting and then perhaps articulate his country’s policy of the extermination of the state of Israel. I would never sit down without preconditions with Raul Castro, who was the executioner and the jailer for thousands of political prisoners in Cuba, and thereby giving him more legitimacy. Those kinds of things, frankly, are a product of inexperience.”
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