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WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton’s victory in Pennsylvania breathed new life and fresh cash into her run for the Democratic presidential nomination, but only dented rival Barack Obama’s nearly unassailable lead in elected delegates. Despite the long odds, Clinton on Wednesday declared herself the best candidate to defeat Arizona Sen. John McCain, who wrapped up the Republican nomination about two months ago and has been benefiting greatly from the increasingly bitter battle between the Democrats.

“I’m confident that when delegates — as well as voters, like the voters of Pennsylvania just did — ask themselves who’s the stronger candidate against John McCain that I will be the nominee of the Democratic party,” Clinton said during a round of television appearances Wednesday.

As soon as her victory was known Tuesday night, Clinton launched an Internet fundraising campaign, hoping to erase part of her campaign’s heavy debt. She told said Wednesday morning she already had raised $3.5 million.

Later Wednesday, her campaign said she was “on track to raise $10 million online in the 24 hours since” she was declared the victor. The campaign said it was her best fundraising day ever. She has been badly trailing Obama in fundraising, raising about half of what he did in March, the last reporting period.

The two-term New York senator’s popular vote margin in Pennsylvania, which hovered between 9 and 10 percentage points as late returns were tallied Wednesday, gave her at least 82 of the state’s 158 delegates, according to an Associated Press analysis of returns. Obama won at least 73.

That means Obama still leads with 1,723.5 delegates, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates. Clinton has 1,592.5, according to the AP tally.

The candidates need 2,025 delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, meaning that the roughly 300 uncommitted superdelegates — out of a total of nearly 800 who have already lined up behind the candidates — were likely to decide the nomination. Superdelegates are party leaders who may choose whomever they like at the Democratic convention in August.

Barring a huge misstep by Obama, many superdelegates would be reluctant to ignore the ballots of the millions of Americans who have voted in record numbers in the most compelling party presidential nominating race in memory. Obama holds the lead in popular votes.

The remaining Democratic contests are primaries in North Carolina, Indiana, Oregon, Kentucky, West Virginia, Montana, South Dakota and Puerto Rico, and caucuses in Guam. Given party rules for apportioning delegates, both candidates would need improbably large victories in all those races to accumulate the necessary pledged delegates.

Both picked up superdelegate endorsements on Wednesday — Obama from Gov. Brad Henry of Oklahoma, who called him an inspirational leader who can unite the United States. Clinton was endorsed by U.S. Rep. John Tanner of Tennessee, co-founder of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of fiscally conservative Democrats in Congress.

Tanner, who said the country is facing an economic crisis, praised Clinton in a statement released by her campaign as a leader “who can work with others to return to fiscal sanity.”

Clinton, bidding to be the first woman U.S. president, overcame Obama’s massive spending in Pennsylvania, especially television advertising that cut the former first lady’s early and overwhelming advantage in the state. He too would make history in U.S. politics as the first black to lead the country.

The Pennsylvania matchup was fierce and bitter, which seemed to harden attitudes among Democrats. Only half of each Democrat’s supporters said they would be satisfied if the other Democrat won the nomination, according to interviews with voters as they left polling stations.

“After 14 long months, it’s easy to forget what this campaign’s about from time to time,” Obama told an Evansville, Indiana, rally, Tuesday night, obliquely conceding that the Pennsylvania race turned nasty.

“It’s easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit-for-tat that consumes our politics, the bickering that none of us are entirely immune to, and it trivializes the profound issues: two wars, an economy in recession, a planet in peril, issues that confront our nation. That kind of politics is not why we are here tonight. It’s not why I’m here, and it’s not why you’re here.”

Clinton, when challenged on voter assessments — even among her supporters — that she ran a negative campaign in an interview with a TV news outlet, said: “This is a very civil campaign by any objective standard.”

“That’s just the way campaigns are run,” she said.

The candidates quickly left hard-fought Pennsylvania behind and headed to fresh challenges in Indiana — seen as a tossup — and North Carolina, where the Illinois senator was expected to win easily because of the large population of fellow African Americans. Primaries in those states will be held May 6.

On the Republican side, McCain skipped a vote on a Senate bill seeking equal pay for women, instead campaigning in a poverty-stricken neighborhood in New Orleans. Democrats had delayed the vote to give Clinton and Obama time to return to Washington to support the measure, which would make it easier for women to sue their employers for pay discrimination.

“I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems,” McCain said.

Clinton criticized him, saying he was falling in line with President George W. Bush. “Women are earning less, but Senator McCain is offering more of the same,” she said.(FoxNews.com)



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