LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) ‘ Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Kentucky primary Tuesday, a victory of scant political value in a Democratic presidential race moving inexorably in Barack Obama’s direction. The two rivals also collided in Oregon’s unique vote-by-mail contest, and Obama predicted he would finish the night with a majority of all delegates at stake in the 56 primaries and caucuses on the campaign calendar. Clinton was gaining 51 percent of the vote in the early Kentucky returns. Obama had 46 percent. Interviews with Kentucky voters leaving their polling places showed almost nine in 10 ballots were cast by whites, and the former first lady was winning their support overwhelmingly. Kentucky had one of the least liberal electorates of 33 competitive Democratic primaries that had exit polls this year ‘ only about a third of voters claimed that label. In contrast, Oregon was among the most liberal, with close to six in 10 voters in the state’s Democratic balloting taking that designation. In most primaries to date, Clinton has done better with more conservative voters, Obama with those who are more liberal. Before vote-counting began, Obama had 1,917 delegates, little more than 100 shy of the 2,026 needed to become the first black presidential nominee of a major party. The former first lady had 1,722. Regardless of the results of the night’s two primaries, Obama decided to mark a victory of sorts. He arranged an evening appearance in Iowa, site of his critical Jan. 3 caucus triumph, to claim a majority of the delegates at stake in all 56 contests on the campaign calendar. ‘The question then becomes how do we complete the nomination process so that we have the majority of the total number of delegates, including superdelegates, to be able to say this thing’s over,’ Obama told The Associated Press in an interview. Clinton looked for a consolation for the strongest presidential campaign of any woman in history. She hoped to finish with more votes than her rival in all the contests combined, including Florida and Michigan, two states that were stripped of their delegates by the national party for moving their primary dates too early. Campaigning with his wife in Kentucky, former President Clinton dismissed Obama’s inevitable claim on pledged delegates. ‘There won’t be tonight, unless you decapitate Michigan and Florida, which violates our values and is dumb politics,’ Bill Clinton said. Kentucky, where Hillary Clinton concentrated much of her efforts in recent days, had 51 convention delegates at stake. Oregon, where Obama invested his time and drew a crowd estimated by police at 75,000 over the weekend, had 52. The state also had the distinction of staging the only contest without a designated polling day. Instead, under a vote-by-mail system, election officials tallied all ballots received by 11 p.m. EDT on primary day. The only primaries remaining are Puerto Rico, on June 1, followed two days later by South Dakota and Montana. Increasingly, Obama has been concentrating his campaign on John McCain, the Republican nominee-in-waiting, rather than on Clinton. The former first lady, too, has jettisoned the sharp attacks against Obama that characterized the race only a few weeks ago, although she bristled on Monday at his decision to focus on the fall campaign. ‘You can declare yourself anything, but if you don’t have the votes, it doesn’t matter,’ she said in an interview with an Oregon television station.
