McCain wins nomination, Obama and Clinton remain deadlocked

John McCain has sealed the Republican nomination for the presidency while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama remain deadlocked in their battle to be the Democrats' candidate after last night's batch of primary results.

McCain swept the four states that voted last night, leading his only serious challenger, Mike Huckabee, to concede defeat to the Arizona senator. Wins in Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island by double-digit leads comfortably took McCain past the 1,191 delegates he needed to take the GOP nomination.

Clinton took three states last night to Obama's one, recording wide margins of victory in Ohio and Rhode Island, and beating Obama by 51-47 per cent in Texas. Obama took Vermont by 22 per cent (60-38), and is leading in the Texas caucus.

The nature of the Democratic race is such that even wins in two such delegate-rich states as Texas and Ohio hasn't narrowed the 100 delegate lead that Obama enjoyed prior to yesterday due to his run of 11 straight primary victories, but it does give Clinton’s moribund campaign a shot in the arm.

Alexander Cockburn, writing for The First Post today, says Obama was too cautious. "Ohio, devastated by job flight, was treated to the spectacle of the Obama campaign failing on this very issue, because Obama shrank from making the full case against what Clinton did to working people in the 1990s. He could have slaughtered the Clinton record on Hillary's disastrous effort at health care reform, on the trade agreements, on the welfare bill, on the well-documented fact that the people who did well in the Clinton era were the rich. He was too innately cautious to play the populist card and he paid the price."

FIRST POSTED MARCH 5, 2008