McCain Clinches Race as Foe Concedes; Democrats Battle Over 2 Crucial States

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.”

Clinton, Obama come charging into crucial day

BEAUMONT, Texas - Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, heading into a set of primaries today that could ignite a Clinton comeback or settle an Obama nomination, campaigned furiously across the Lone Star State yesterday in what could be the climactic battle of the Democratic primary season.
With a steely resolve and little sleep, Clinton began her campaign day in Toledo, Ohio, bringing predawn doughnuts and a promise of economic relief to shift workers at a Chrysler plant and finishing with a town hall meeting in Austin last night.
Obama focused on Texas, racing from San Antonio to Carrollton and then Houston. In recent days, Obama has largely traded his trademark giant rallies for more intimate, policy-focused gatherings, including ones yesterday on veterans' issues and college affordability. Last night, Obama hosted a rally in Houston with his wife, Michelle.
With new polls out yesterday that suggested she had expanded her narrow lead in Ohio and is deadlocked with Obama in Texas, Clinton dismissed questions about whether she would give up her quest for the nomination if she does not win both states, despite suggestions from some of her most prominent supporters that she should consider withdrawing if that happens.
"I'm just getting warmed up," Clinton told reporters yesterday, saying she was planning on pushing ahead to the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania.
Under heavy pressure from Democrats in both camps to score wins today, the Clinton campaign stepped up its attacks on Obama yesterday, shifting from criticism of what it calls his lack of substance to an assault on his character and putting Obama on the defensive hours ahead of the voting.
The New York senator pointed to a memo - written by an official in Canada's consulate in Chicago after a meeting there last month - indicating that Obama's chief economic adviser told Canadian government officials that Obama's criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement was directed at primary voters in Ohio and other states and did not represent his real position. Obama's campaign had previously denied such conversations took place.
"That's the kind of difference between talk and action that I've been pointing out in this campaign," Clinton told reporters while campaigning in Ohio.
Obama said his campaign never gave Canada back-channel assurances. The Obama adviser, Austan Goolsbee, disputed the account of his remarks. The Canadian embassy later issued a statement that the memo, obtained by the Associated Press, did not intend "to convey, in any way, that Senator Obama and his campaign team were taking a different position in public from views expressed in private, including about NAFTA."
Obama also contended that until she began running for president, Clinton supported NAFTA, which was approved during her husband's administration.
The Clinton campaign also attacked Obama for his relationship with Chicago businessman Tony Rezko, a friend and fund-raiser whose trial on federal corruption charges began yesterday. Obama has been questioned about a deal in which he purchased his home in Chicago at the same time Rezko's wife bought a neighboring lot.
Clinton's campaign has called on Obama to reveal more information about his relationship with Rezko, including any campaign contributions Rezko helped collect for Obama. The Illinois senator is not accused of wrongdoing in the case, in which Rezko is charged with using campaign money to buy political influence and launch a multimillion-dollar scheme to shake down companies seeking government contracts.
Obama said yesterday that Rezko's problems are not his. "These charges are completely unrelated to me, and nobody disputes that," Obama told reporters. "There's no dispute that he raised money for us, and there's no dispute that we've tried to get rid of it."
While Obama and his supporters sought to dismiss the attacks as coming from a desperate campaign anxious to discredit him, Clinton continued to present herself as the most qualified candidate to run the country.
"President Bush is just going to leave this big mess," Clinton told a labor-heavy group in Toledo early in the day. "Who would you hire for this job?"
Clinton tried to tailor her messages to the electorates in Ohio and Texas, focusing on jobs in Ohio, which has lost more than 200,000 nonfarm jobs since 2000, and on national security in Texas, which has had 366 military deaths in the Iraq war, the second-most of any state. Clinton continued to press the case that she is prepared to be commander-in-chief - and Obama is not - with a new TV ad in Texas that highlighted his acknowledgment that he had not held an oversight hearing on the Afghanistan conflict as chairman of a Senate subcommittee because he has been running for president.
Obama, meanwhile, aired two-minute TV ads across Ohio and Texas last night in which, speaking directly to voters, he pledged to solve problems, end partisan divisions, and "carry your voices to the White House" to transform the country.
Clinton's senior staff said they were confident of her chances today, but contended that it is Obama - who has won the last 11 contests - who needs to do well to prove to the party that Democratic voters are not feeling "buyer's remorse."
Still, there were signs of anxiety in the Clinton campaign. Her recent rallies have been smaller than those in earlier contests, and have drawn far fewer people than Obama attracted in the same cities.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has endorsed Clinton, yesterday became the latest Democrat to suggest she might need to drop out if she does not do well today. "Let's see how Tuesday plays out, and then let's start thinking about how we're going to get behind a candidate," Whitehouse told Providence radio station WPRO.
Clinton has natural constituencies in both Texas and Ohio, with heavy support among Latinos and record turnout expected in the Lone Star State and from blue-collar workers in Ohio. But Clinton's campaign maintained yesterday that it is Obama who starts out with an advantage in those states, where he has outspent Clinton approximately two-to-one.
Voters in Rhode Island and Vermont also go to the polls today, with a total of 370 delegates at stake in the four states and with Obama holding a 109-delegate lead, according to an Associated Press tally.
Obama said he had won too many states for his success to be easily dismissed.
"I would think at this point, the question is no longer, is it a big enough state, or is it a state with too many black people, or is it a state that's in the Midwest or is a caucus state," he told reporters. "We've won states and we've won delegates."
But Obama hastened to add that he was taking nothing for granted. "Senator Clinton is running a tenacious campaign," he said. "We know that this has been an extraordinary election and continues to be."