Obama: it’s a tremendous achievement...

Only two people have ever defeated a Clinton in electoral combat. The first was a Republican, Frank White, who evicted Bill for a couple of years from the Arkansas governor's mansion in 1980. The second is Barack Obama, who went over the top in the delegate count yesterday, prompting Hillary Clinton to slouch sulkily to the brink of a formal concession, while she manoeuvers for everything from an offer of the nomination for vice president, to a big role at the convention in Denver, to help in paying off her campaign debts.

To have persuaded enough Democrats that a black man can be their champion in November and have a passable chance of winning the Oval Office is a tremendous achievement, even if Obama's campaign has flagged badly in recent weeks. But by then Obama was cantering through the final straight. The battle was won in the first two months, when Obama ambushed Mrs Clinton's slow-moving phalanx.

He crushed Mrs Clinton in grass-roots organising and in fund-raising which eventually left her campaign - top-heavy with consultants extorting huge salaries - deeply in debt. Meanwhile, Obama banked millions both from big Wall Street institutions and small contributors. Obama survived the uproar over his radical pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who surely helped his former congregant. If the accusation was Obama is a closet Black Panther plotting to enslave the white race, it was better he got this charge hurled at him in now than in the autumn.

Mrs Clinton was not so agile in separating herself from her husband who spent what he described as probably his last day on the campaign trail cursing a New York Times reporter, Todd Purdum, for a nasty piece in Vanity Fair charging him with uncouth cavortings with teenage girls and billionaires.

Obama turns on young people who flock to his rallies. He promises not only to "create a new kind of politics" but to "transform this country", "change the world", "create a Kingdom right here on earth". Comingled with these doses of up-lift are the familiar coarse pledges to crucial interest groups, such as the Miami Cubans. Obama's speech to them on May 25 was an appalling exercise in right-wing demagoguery.

We can look ahead to months of Obama deflecting McCain's onslaughts on him as a starry-eyed peacenik by insisting that what the beleaguered Empire needs above all is efficiency, ruthless if necessary. "The [US] generals are light-years ahead of the civilians," he reassured the New York Times columnist, David Brooks. "They're trying to get the job done rather than look tough."

Can a black man get elected president in 2008? Hillary Clinton said no. In the last weeks she ran up some impressive totals of white voters agreeing with her, as in West Virginia where Obama scarcely campaigned.

Obama right now has an edge in electoral college votes, though this depends on which faction of number crunchers you believe. By almost every yardstick, except the wild card of his skin colour, he'll win. It should be inconceivable for a Republican to capture the White House for the third time in a row when gas is headed towards $5 a gallon, food prices are soaring and most Americans reckon things are going to get a lot worse.

Hillary's supporters suggest that as Obama's running mate she would be a huge boost to the ticket. Others say all she might deliver him is Arkansas and maybe help in Florida, but who wants Bill Clinton anywhere near the ticket? Other possible veep choices for Obama range from Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, supposedly a draw for Hispanics, or Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, a tough Vietnam vet who talks one of the best populist games in America, to the Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a decent fellow, also a Vietnam vet against the war in Iraq, though his anti-abortion stand is anathema to liberal Democratic women.

At least for now, the Clinton dynasty is headed for the retirement home. None too soon, I say, however Obama turns out. ·