Obama plans Iowa trip with victory in sight
US: Sen. Barack Obama, hoping that a pair of contests in Oregon and
Kentucky on Tuesday will allow him to essentially clinch the Democratic
nomination, will make a symbolic return to Iowa, the state that launched
his underdog bid for the White House. Polls suggest Obama will win
Oregon comfortably while his rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, is expected to
prevail in Kentucky by a wide margin.
But the Obama campaign expects that when the results from the two
contests are added to his existing tally, he will have racked up more
than half of the pledged delegates awarded in the state-by-state
contests, making him the likely winner in his battle with Clinton to
become his party's nominee to face presumptive Republican nominee John
McCain in November.
Neither Obama nor Clinton will have enough pledged delegates to lock
up the nomination, but Obama contends that superdelegates - party
leaders and elected officials with their own vote in the process -
should back the leader in pledged delegates.
The nominating contests began in January in Iowa, where Obama, an
Illinois senator, beat Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady
who was the national front-runner then and had an aura of inevitability.
Obama's trip to Iowa on Tuesday offers not only a chance for him to
look back on the race, but also an opportunity to look ahead to the
potential fight with McCain. Roseburg, Ore., Sunday, Reuters
|