For Obama, No Time to Stop and Savor Victory

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Obama Pledges Commitment to Israel's Security

Barack Obama told a pro-Israel group that he will be committed to protecting Israel if elected president. Obama says current U.S. foreign policy has made both Israel and America less secure.

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When Obama walked onto the Senate floor to vote around noon, he was greeted by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), a political independent who leans Democratic but who had an hour earlier issued a sharp critique of Obama's AIPAC speech on a Republican conference call. Lieberman, a leading surrogate of presumptive Republican candidate John McCain, has offered to speak at the GOP convention, prompting some of his erstwhile Democratic colleagues to call for booting him from their caucus.

Lieberman and Obama stepped to the side of the chamber and had a conversation that lasted considerably longer than the Obama-Clinton exchange.

"We were just talking some politics," Obama later told reporters.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (Mo.), a self-described "rabid" Obama supporter, said she spoke to him by telephone Tuesday afternoon and urged him to savor the moment. "I said, 'Hey, take a minute tonight to quit doing what you always do' -- and before the conversation was over he did what he always does," which is to look ahead to the next battle, against McCain.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) joined Obama on the flight back to Washington that night, which took off from Minneapolis at 1 a.m. Eastern time. Despite the late hour, no one seemed tired, the freshman senator noted, and Obama's aides were "jubilant."

But she said that Obama cautioned the group, "You don't cut down the basketball nets in the middle of the conference championship." As he talked over the AIPAC speech and teased his aides through the bumpy flight, Obama seemed "steady and upbeat and ready to go," Klobuchar said.

Obama told reporters in Washington that he is humbled by the path he has blazed.

"You think about all the people who have knocked down barriers for me to walk through this door," he said. "And the challenges they went through, which were so much more difficult and so much more severe. And the risks they took were so much greater." As he spoke in St. Paul on Tuesday night, he said, "it struck me that this was a testimony to them."

After casting a vote on a budget bill, Obama flew to New York for party fundraisers. Aides said his one goal for the evening was to squeeze in a run before going to bed.

"He's a little tired to be euphoric," said his chief political strategist, David Axelrod. "He did his AIPAC event, he ran into Hillary, he voted in the Senate. It was a pretty low-key day."