Democrat Barack Obama plunged Wednesday into a five-month election battle with Republican John McCain after making history by becoming the first black presidential nominee of a major US party.
The Illinois senator's giant-killing win over Hillary Clinton came at the climax late Tuesday of the longest, most expensive and spellbinding nominating epic ever.Dominating newspaper front-pages across the world, Obama declared to 19,000 baying supporters in St. Paul, Minnesota: "America, this is our moment.
"This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past," the 46-year-old Chicagoan declaimed, tweaking the Republicans by speaking at the venue of their presidential convention in September.
"Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States," he said in his victory speech .
Obama's momentous victory , five months since his shock win over Clinton in the very first nominating contest in Iowa, set up an intriguing general election clash with McCain, the 71-year-old Republican senator from Arizona.
On November 4, voters must pick between Obama, a freshman senator and charismatic standard-bearer of a new political generation, and McCain, a wounded Vietnam war hero asking for one final call to service.
Well ahead of the election, Obama has a slight edge over McCain , 46.6 - 45.2 percent, in an average of national opinion polls by RealClearPolitics.com, with their battle already boiling over Iraq, whether to talk to US enemies like Iran, and the ailing US economy.
Both Obama and Clinton were due to address an influential pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, giving the new presumptive nominee a chance to stake out his appeal for a new diplomacy in the Middle East.
Clinton, thwarted in her own historic quest to be the first female president, refused to explicitly admit defeat and said she would consult with supporters and party leaders "in the coming days" on the way forward.
Failing an outright concession from the New York senator, the Democratic Party's seniormost figures are reportedly set to go public with an appeal to the last undeclared "superdelegates" to declare their preferred candidate.
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean were to release a statement Wednesday urging the party to close ranks against McCain, the Huffington Post website and CNN reported.
"The move ... is an indication that few figures beyond Clinton's utmost loyalists are willing to stomach a prolonged vacation period for the New York Democrat to make up her mind," the Huffington Post said.
Obama captured the final primary in Montana, after a flood of endorsements from Democratic superdelegates during the day, and vaulted over the winning post of 2,118 delegates needed at the party's August nominating convention.
Obama now has 2,165 delegates to the former first lady's 1,923.
Clinton snapped up a consolation victory in South Dakota's primary, taking 55 percent of votes to Obama's 45 percent. In Montana, Obama had 56 percent to Clinton's 41 percent.
McCain got his attack in first, branding Obama the "wrong change" for America. On her first campaign visit to New Hampshire, in February 2007, Hillary Rodham Clinton was confronted by a voter who demanded she explain her 2002 Senate vote authorizing the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
"I want to know if right here, right now, once and for all and without nuance, you can say that war authorization was a mistake," Roger Tilton asked Clinton. "I, and I think a lot of other primary voters — until we hear you say it, we're not going to hear all the other great things you are saying."
Clinton replied, as she would repeat in the ensuing months: "Knowing what we know now, I would never have voted for it."
Her refusal to admit error failed to satisfy Tilton, a 46-year-old financial analyst from Nashua even though he loved her position on health care and capping Iraq troop levels.
That exchange, pounced upon by some reporters to the displeasure of Clinton's aides, foreshadowed her demise. Her refusal to back off that vote tied her to the past and to an unpopular war. It embodied her campaign's fundamental miscalculation: the decision to present her as the standard-bearer for Washington experience, ready for office on Day One.
As such it was a telltale moment in the former first lady's dizzying 17-month slide from prohibitive front-runner to also-ran — upended by Barack Obama, a rookie on the national political scene, and by his message of change, in a year voters hungered for change.
By itself, Clinton's Iraq vote didn't cost her the nomination. There were other culprits: her ever-changing campaign themes, poor financial planning, squabbling staff and a field organizing plan designed for quick victory rather than a 50-state delegate hunt.
And there were events along the way that were omens of her downfall — many not fully appreciated in the bright glow of her near-universal name recognition, endorsements from the party establishment and long early lead in the polls.
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The first quarter of 2007 ended with a big surprise for the Clinton campaign, the reputed powerhouse of Democratic fundraising: Obama raised $25 million from more than 100,000 donors in those three months. While the New York senator had raised $26 million from 60,000 donors, just $20 million was for primaries, $6 million for the general election. Obama's total included $23 million for the primaries.
At first, word of Obama's success led to near-panic within the Clinton team. Eventually, the agitation gave way to a wary calm. "He raised a lot, we raised a lot," spokesman Howard Wolfson mused.
Clinton's money had come largely from squeezing wealthy individuals for the maximum legal contribution of $2,300 for the primaries and $2,300 for the general election. The Obama campaign mined the Internet for small donations from people who could be re-solicited throughout the campaign.
Obama would raise $265 million for the primaries from more than 2 million individuals. Clinton raised $215 million, and would end her campaign more than $30 million in debt. Obama's army of small donors paid for the field organization he would build, drawing on grass-roots support across the country and penetrating states Clinton couldn't afford to contest.
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In May of last year, a memo from Clinton deputy campaign manager Mike Henry leaked that both foreshadowed and helped produce dire events for her campaign. Henry recommended the New York senator skip the leadoff Iowa caucuses. The document roiled her campaign and revealed the first of many staff disputes. It also would help seal her poor showing in the state months later, which gave Obama a chance to show that white voters would support a black presidential candidate.
Clinton's advisers had fretted about her chances in Iowa. Bill Clinton did not campaign in the state in his first presidential run in 1992, and the couple had never built the organization needed to win the caucuses.
Supporters like former Gov. Tom Vilsack warned that Clinton was starting dangerously late and needed to visit the state more. Campaign people worried that Clinton was sticking to a rigorous schedule in the Senate, not spending serious time in Iowa until late summer 2007.
Although the notion that she wouldn't compete in the campaign's first contest was never considered by campaigns chiefs, Henry had the respect of many in the campaign including top adviser and delegate-hunter Harold Ickes, and he was encouraged to put his concerns about Clinton's Iowa chances in writing.
The leak of Henry's memo — which accurately pointed out that Iowa was Clinton's weakest state and would require a multimillion-dollar investment that might be better spent elsewhere — was a blow that put her on the defensive in Iowa for the remainder of the campaign.
Sure enough, it cost Clinton $25 million to finish third in Iowa — narrowly behind John Edwards but swamped by Obama, whose organizers had identified thousands of young, first-time caucus-goers to come out for him. Henry left the campaign not long after.
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Clinton delivered strong performances in a long series of televised debates, but that streak came apart in a single moment in Philadelphia in late October 2007, when she was asked during a forum on MSNBC if she would support a proposal by her state's governor, Eliot Spitzer, to allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses.
"I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it," Clinton said.
That response, and other non-answers that night, made her seem evasive and opportunistic. Media coverage, until then largely respectful, turned critical.
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Until January of this year, former President Clinton had been viewed as an asset for his wife among her aides and supporters. Although reviled by conservatives for his affair with a White House intern, Bill Clinton remained a beloved figure among Democratic audiences, particularly blacks, who remembered the 1990s as relatively prosperous and his efforts on their behalf.
That changed in South Carolina, where the former president campaigned vigorously for his wife. Her advisers, aware of his tendency to go off message, had urged him to stay positive and talk up her accomplishments, not criticize Obama.
But Bill Clinton chafed at the campaign's reluctance to take on the Illinois senator, particularly over what the former president viewed as conflicts between Obama's rhetoric of opposition to the Iraq war and his voting record. So he took it on himself to speak out, with calamitous results.
Obama won South Carolina, and Bill Clinton then made things worse. He seemed to diminish Obama's triumph by noting that civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, never the presidential contender that Obama had already become, had also won the state's primary years earlier.
Once so popular among blacks he was dubbed the first black president by author Toni Morrison, Bill Clinton had helped drive those voters away from his wife. Obama's already strong black support would climb to as much as 90 percent of the black vote in subsequent contests.
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Super Tuesday primaries on Feb. 5 looked at first to be a strong showing for Clinton, though not the knockout blow her camp once anticipated.
In fact, a miscalculation about that day propelled her long and steady decline.
Although she won large state primaries — California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts — she all but ceded caucuses to Obama in places like Colorado, Minnesota and Kansas. By the final count Obama had collected a few more delegates than Clinton of the nearly 1,700 at stake that day.
Clinton had developed an aversion to caucuses after her bad experience in Iowa; she even publicly called them unrepresentative and undemocratic. Combined with poor budgeting and a poor understanding of the party's system of proportional allocation of delegates, that led to catastrophic strategic planning for the Super Tuesday contests.
When Clinton was still riding high in the polls, campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe, chief strategist Mark Penn and other advisers believed she would come close to clinching the nomination by winning large — if expensive — primary states. The campaign had budgeted accordingly.
Other Clinton advisers had vainly warned that proportional allocation would allow Obama to pick up plenty of delegates in the states Clinton won on Super Tuesday and dozens more in the caucus states if Clinton did not contest them. 
Those warnings went largely unheeded and the big-state Super Tuesday strategy failed badly. Clinton's campaign was left nearly broke, with no real plan for how to approach the contests to come. Obama scored 11 straight wins in February alone, while Clinton was forced to lend her campaign $5 million just to stay afloat. He took the overall delegate lead Feb. 12 and never lost it.
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In March, a self-inflicted wound did more than anything else to undermine her claim of foreign policy experience — and her efforts to reassure voters of her trustworthiness. More than once she personally described coming under sniper fire as first lady during an 1996 airport landing in Bosnia.
"There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base," Clinton said during a foreign policy speech in Washington. In the hours afterward, her claim was discredited by video of the landing which surfaced on television news and YouTube. But Clinton stuck to her story for a week before finally acknowledging she misspoke. "A minor blip," she called it.
Her aides knew it to be anything but. Privately, they were horrified by the gaffe and saw almost no realistic way to defend it.
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None of the mistakes by Clinton and her campaign team was fatal in and of itself. She and her husband were experts in extricating themselves from death-defying jams.
But Obama proved to be more than just a traditional opponent. In the end, the Clintons' usual tactics — big-scale fundraising, high-powered political connections, old-fashioned grit and determination — were no match for Obama and a candidacy uniquely suited to the moment.
Campaigning in the final primaries, Clinton said, "I've really enjoyed the process of being able to go out and see this country anew." But what she saw was a country that wanted someone new.
The Democratic presidential nomination his, Barack Obama reached out Wednesday to mend fences with his defeated rival as Republican opponent John McCain tried to frame the fall campaign on his own terms. "I think he has exercised very bad judgment on national security issues and others," McCain said.
Hillary was angling to become Obama's running mate and her aides ramped up the speculation on that matter. "I think a lot of her supporters would like to see her on the ticket," Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe said. But Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs cautioned "there is no deal in the works."
Clinton has yet to acknowledge Obama's victory in the bruising Democratic race and her aides said on the morning talk shows that she would take a few days to decide what comes next for her. Obama spoke by phone with her Tuesday night and both sides predicted he and Clinton would sit down together before long.
"When the dust settles and it makes sense for her, he'll meet whenever she wants to," Gibbs said. "She's accumulated a lot of votes throughout this country. We want to make sure that we're appealing to her voters."
The primaries behind them, Obama and McCain were drawing the battle line for a fall fight that will make history with the election of either the oldest first-term president in McCain or the first black commander in chief in Obama. In speeches marking the start of the general election, both maneuvered for the advantage with voters sour on the status quo.
Both were competing beyond their party's base, too.
"The key to winning the election is independent voters and Democrats as well," McCain said in an interview shown Wednesday on ABC's "Good Morning America." Even so, he said "I don't think so" when asked on CBS whether he'd pick a Democrat as his running mate.
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