Clinton stays alive, McCain wins nomination

Hillary Clinton won a critical showdown with Barack Obama on Tuesday to breathe new life into her campaign and extend the Democratic presidential race, while John McCain clinched the Republican nomination and looked ahead to the November election.

Clinton, 60, a New York senator, won Texas after earlier taking Ohio and Rhode Island. The win for Clinton snapped Obama's winning streak at 12 and defied widespread predictions that losses in Ohio and Texas would force to end her White House bid.

It sends the hotly contested Democratic race on to contests in Wyoming and Mississippi and the next major showdown in Pennsylvania on April 22.

"We're going on, we're going strong, and we're going all the way," Clinton told roaring supporters in Columbus, Ohio. "We're just getting started."

McCain's four big victories in Vermont, Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island drove his last major rival, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, out of the race and gave McCain more than the 1,191 delegates needed to win the nomination.

President George W. Bush will endorse the Arizona senator at the White House on Wednesday.

"I am very pleased to note that tonight, my friends, we have won enough delegates to claim with confidence, humility and a sense of great responsibility that I will be the Republican nominee for president of the United States," McCain, 71, told supporters in Dallas.

"The contest begins tonight," the former Navy fighter pilot and prisoner of war in Vietnam said, looking ahead to a match-up with either Obama or Clinton in the November presidential election.

Exit polls showed Clinton won big among voters who decided in the last few days, when she questioned Obama's readiness to be commander in chief and the sincerity of his pledges to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is blamed in Ohio for manufacturing job losses.

Clinton led Obama slightly, 50 percent to 48 percent, with about 55 percent of the precincts counted in Texas.

"On our way to winning"

Obama shrugged off his defeats, saying he was on his way to winning the Democratic party's presidential nomination.

"No matter what happens tonight, we have nearly the same delegate lead as we did this morning, and we are on our way to winning this nomination," Obama told cheering supporters.

"Tonight, because of you, because of a movement you built that stretches from Vermont's green mountains to the streets of San Antonio, we can stand up with confidence and clarity to say that we are turning the page, and we are ready to write to the next great chapter in America's story," Obama said.

And he told the rally that he had already called Senator John McCain to congratulate him on winning the Republican Party's nomination.

"In the weeks to come, we will begin a great debate about the future of this country, with a man who has served it bravely and loves it dearly," he said, referring to McCain, a Vietnam war veteran.

But he said McCain had "fallen in line behind the very same policies that have ill served America. He has seen where (president) George Bush has taken our country, and he promises to keep us on the very same course."

Pressing his message that he was the candidate of hope and change, Obama said: "We want a new course for this country. We want new leadership in Washington. We want change in America.

"John McCain and Hillary Clinton have echoed each other, dismissing this call for change as eloquent but empty, speeches, not solutions, and yet, they know, or they should know, that it is a call that did not begin with my words."