Obama aides work hard to wrap it all up tonight

TROY, Mich. — With voters in South Dakota and Montana set to end the five-month primary season Tuesday, Sen. Barack Obama's aides spent the day privately pressing superdelegates to get behind him, hoping to convert tonight's victory party in St. Paul, Minn., at the Xcel Energy Center where John McCain will receive the GOP nomination in September, into a complete triumph.

But in public, Obama took pains to extend something of an olive branch to rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose last-ditch efforts to secure the nomination appear headed for defeat.

"Senator Clinton has run an outstanding race. She is an outstanding public servant, and she and I will be working together in November," Obama said to raucous cheers from a crowd of about 2,000 at Troy High School.

Clinton invited fundraisers and other supporters to an election night rally in New York City where aides told The New York Times she was prepared to deliver what they described as a farewell speech that summed up the case for her candidacy. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton telegraphed that the race might be wrapping up.

"I want to say also that this may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of this kind," he said. "I thought I was out of politics until Hillary decided to run, but it has been one of the greatest honors of my life to be able to go around and campaign for her for president."

Obama told reporters that he had talked to Sen. Clinton on Sunday and asked her for a meeting on her terms, "once the dust settles."

Adding to the sense of imminent closure, a handful of superdelegates endorsed Obama Monday, including Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, one of the most prominent black politicians in Congress. That left Obama 42 delegates shy of securing the nomination.

Obama's campaign advisers said that they were orchestrating an endorsement of Obama by at least eight Senate and House members who had pledged to remain uncommitted until the primaries ended, and that the endorsements would come the moment the South Dakota polls closed on Tuesday night.

McCain chides Obama over approach to Iran

WASHINGTON — John McCain told an influential Jewish group Monday that the security of Israel and the United States depends on a tough-minded approach to a potentially nuclear-armed Iran, mocking presidential rival Barack Obama's pledge to meet with Iranian leaders.

"We hear talk of a meeting with the Iranian leadership offered up as if it were some sudden inspiration, a bold new idea that somehow nobody has ever thought of before," McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said in a speech to the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "Yet it's hard to see what such a summit with President Ahmadinejad would actually gain, except an earful of anti-Semitic rants and a worldwide audience for a man who denies one Holocaust and talks before frenzied crowds about starting another."

McCain also slammed Obama for refusing to support a nonbinding Senate resolution that designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization because it supports killing American troops in Iraq. In a conference call organized by the Obama campaign, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said "direct engagement" such as Obama's call for direct, unconditional meetings with Iranian leaders would be a "productive change in policy."

Bill Clinton lashes out at Vanity Fair article

MILBANK, S.D. — After a weekend in which his aides sought to discredit an article in Vanity Fair that, relying primarily on anonymous sources, raised questions about his judgment, the company he keeps and whether he was spending time with other women, former President Bill Clinton unleashed a tirade against the story's author, Todd Purdum, a former New York Times reporter.

According to the Huffington Post Web site, Clinton, as he worked the rope line at an event here, called Purdum "sleazy," "slimy," "dishonest" and a "scumbag." The article asked what was behind the transformation of the most skilled politician of his generation into a sometimes intemperate campaigner whose outbursts on the hustings are thought to have hurt his wife's run for the nomination.

"Much of Clinton's behavior on the campaign trail this year has been so maladroit as to constitute malpractice: his blowups at television reporters, his derisive dismissal of Obama's unwavering anti-war stance as a 'fairy tale,' and most of all his denigrating comparison of Obama's performance in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson's victories there two decades ago," Purdum wrote.

Purdum said the article spoke for itself and Clinton's aides later issued a statement saying that he had been "understandably upset about an outrageously unfair article," but that the language he had used about Purdum "was inappropriate and he wishes he had not used it."

Cheney jokes about West Virginians

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney joked about backward West Virginians on Monday, but quickly apologized.

Talking about his family roots and how records show he's distantly related to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, the vice president noted that he had Cheneys on both sides of his family.

"And we don't even live in West Virginia," Cheney quipped.

On Capitol Hill, Cheney's comment was denounced by both Democrats and Republicans.

"This is exactly the type of stereotyping that we don't need from our elected officials," said Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va. "It's disrespectful, and it's certainly not funny. ... As a proud state, I can say we are disappointed."

Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride later said: "On reflection, he concluded that it was an inappropriate attempt at humor that he should not have made. The vice president apologizes to the people of West Virginia for the inappropriate remark."

The comment came during a question-and-answer session after the annual Gerald R. Ford Journalism Awards.

Also

Seattle attorney and Democratic National Committee member David McDonald, one of 17 superdelegates in Washington state, endorsed Barack Obama for the party's presidential nomination on Monday.

Seattle Times news services