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NEWS : STORIES
More than five months after Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama began their
In fact, The Associated Press reported early Tuesday that a Clinton speech scheduled for Tuesday night in New York, while stopping short of formally suspending or ending her bid, would include a concession by the New York Senator that Obama has the delegates necessary to secure the nomination; the report cited an unnamed source. But a short time later, Clinton's campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, said the AP story was "100 percent" incorrect and clarified to CNN that Clinton is "absolutely not" prepared to concede that Obama has won the delegate race. And later Tuesday, the story took another turn when Clinton reportedly told congressional colleagues she would be open to becoming Obama's vice-presidential nominee, saying she would consider it if it would help Democrats win the White House, according to MSNBC.com. Senator Clinton reportedly made the comment on a conference call with other New York lawmakers Tuesday, according a participant on the call, and did so in response to a question from Democratic Representative Nydia Velazquez, who said she believed the best way for Obama to win over key voting blocs, including Hispanics, would be for him to choose Clinton as his running mate. The final two primaries come after a weekend of furious activity that included answering the biggest outstanding question of the primary season — what to do with the disallowed delegates from Michigan and Florida — and the tallying of another big win for Clinton, in Puerto Rico, in an effort that many pundits continue to feel is a fruitless one. On Saturday, the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee voted to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations — whose votes were disallowed because the states violated party rules and moved up their primaries. The committee voted to reinstate all of the two states' delegates to the national convention in Denver in August, though each state was penalized by being given only a half vote. The decision gave Clinton 105 pledged delegates from Florida and 69 from Michigan, for a total of 87 votes, while Obama got 67 from Florida and 59 from Michigan, for a total of 63 votes. Even with the additional delegates, Obama leads Clinton by the equivalent of 178 delegates, according to CNN. If each disputed delegate had received a full vote, Obama would still have led Clinton. Clinton, who has long vowed to stay in the race until every state has voted, breezed into the wind-down of the bare-knuckle primary season with an impressive win in Puerto Rico on Sunday. She beat Obama by a margin of nearly 2-to-1, 68 percent to 32 percent, taking the lion's share of the U.S. territory's 55 delegates. (Citizens of Puerto Rico cannot vote in the general election, which may explain why turnout was low.) Though the margin on the island was wide, and Clinton won in nearly every major demographic group — including men and women, as well as her traditional older voting base and Obama's typically reliable younger voting bloc — it did little to close the gap with Obama. With Clinton polling well ahead of him in the week leading up to the Puerto Rico primary, Obama quickly conceded the win to his rival, but treated the victory as another stop toward his presumed coronation as the Democratic candidate. Campaigning in South Dakota on Sunday, he congratulated Clinton and said she was going to be a "great asset when we go into November to make sure that we defeat the Republicans," according to CNN. Amid the flurry of additional headlines on Monday was a surprising comment from former President Bill Clinton, who told an audience in South Dakota that his time stumping for his wife might be winding down. "This may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of this kind," he said, according to CNN, seemingly conceding that his wife's historic bid for the presidency was coming to an end. In a sign that Hillary Clinton may be gearing up for a major announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Monday that she is planning to give her post-primary speech at Baruch College in her home state of New York Tuesday night, rather than in either South Dakota or Montana. One of her top aides said, "New York is where she started, New York is where she ends," according to the paper. Also Monday, a group composed of several of the 17 uncommitted Senate superdelegates held a closed-door meeting to discuss their plans for when the polls close on Tuesday, with most of them planning to back Obama, sources told the CNN. The delegate total for Tuesday's final two primaries is only 31, but Democrats hope that the official end of the primary season will allow them to finally reach a consensus on who will take on presumptive Republican nominee Senator John McCain in November. Though Obama is not expected to come out of Tuesday's primaries with enough pledged delegates to reach the new magic number needed to clinch the nomination — now 2,118 following the addition of the Michigan and Florida votes — speculation is that enough superdelegates will flock his way later this week to make him the presumptive nominee. [This story was originally published at 8:00 am E.T. on 06.03.2008] This report is provided by MTV News
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