For Obama, No Time to Stop and Savor Victory

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 5, 2008

To the victor go the headaches.

There were no champagne toasts for Barack Obama after he clinched the Democratic nomination Tuesday night. His wife, Michelle, and a group of friends returned to Chicago on a separate plane. The senator from Illinois spent much of his post-rally time in Minnesota trying to reach Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on the telephone before flying to Washington, where a fresh set of challenges awaited.

He had to deliver a crucial speech to Jewish leaders skeptical of his commitment to Israel. There were troubling signs of disarray within his own party. And there was the small matter of a primary opponent who still had not dropped out of the race.

When his campaign plane hit a patch of heavy turbulence, Obama ignored the pilot's request for passengers to take their seats. Instead, he remained standing in the aisle, conferring with aides about the speech he would deliver the next morning to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Obama was joined at yesterday's AIPAC event by his old friend Rahm Emanuel. The congressman from Chicago and longtime aide to President Bill Clinton had decided to abandon his neutrality before the former first lady removed herself from contention.

But Emanuel would prove the exception among prominent uncommitted Democrats. Most stayed on the sidelines yesterday to give Clinton room to decide her fate.

As Obama moved from event to event in Washington, the Clinton drama shadowed him. After wrapping up his well-received AIPAC speech, he bumped into Clinton in the hallway, and the two took a brief stroll. An Obama aide clocked the exchange: 90 seconds.

Speaking to reporters later on Capitol Hill, Obama was peppered with questions about the senator from New York.

What did he think of her non-concession speech Tuesday night? "I thought Senator Clinton, after a long-fought campaign, was understandably focused on her supporters."

What was the status of their relationship? "I just spoke to her today, and we are going to be having a conversation in the coming weeks."

Although Democrats saluted Obama's win and called for unity, many seemed fixated on not offending Clinton. Sen. Ken Salazar (Colo.) endorsed Obama by a news release, which buried the news below a paragraph praising Clinton. Sen. James Webb (Va.), whose name has surfaced on vice presidential lists, said he wasn't quite ready to declare his allegiance. "We're sorting all that out," he told reporters as he hurried into the Senate chamber.

Party leaders issued an early-morning statement that was so vague, it could have been written a month ago. Without acknowledging Obama's delegate victory, it asserted that "Democrats must now turn our full attention to the general election." The authors were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and Democratic Governors Association Chairman Joe Manchin.

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."