Obama expects Hillary knockout next week

White House hopeful Barack Obama believes he is on the brink of eliminating Hillary Clinton from the Democratic fight as their exhausting primary season heads to a climax next week.
Party leaders including House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid said Thursday the race would be wrapped up soon -- and dropped every hint that Obama would emerge as the victor.
But ahead of Sunday's primary in Puerto Rico, and the final contests in Montana and South Dakota on Tuesday, Clinton's campaign was adamant she remained the better bet to take on Republican John McCain.
"Obviously, it's not over until we get to the convention or until Senator Clinton makes the decision that she's now prepared to support a unified ticket," former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle told MSNBC television.
But Daschle, a national co-chair of Obama's campaign, said "I do believe that sometime over the course of the next week we're going to be in a very good position to claim at least that we've got the majority of the delegates."
After nearly six months of coast-to-coast campaigning, Obama is in striking distance of amassing enough Democratic delegates to earn the right to battle McCain in November's presidential election.
But Clinton's campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe insisted that the New York senator remained a far stronger candidate than Obama to recapture the White House for the Democrats.
"Hillary Clinton is the one who can do it. She's got more popular votes. She's got more votes out of the primaries. More people have come out to support Hillary Clinton," McAuliffe said.
"You just can't shove her to the curb and say forget about all that," he said, as the Clinton campaign invited her traveling press corps to sign up for unspecified events all through next week.
Ahead of the final three primaries, the Democratic Party's rules and bylaws committee will meet Saturday to adjudicate on whether delegates from Florida and Michigan should be reinstated after a scheduling row.
While no outcome is likely to seriously dent Obama's delegate lead, Clinton does need her victories in the two states to be counted to buttress her case that she leads in the national popular vote after 51 valid contests.
Pelosi, the nation's top elected Democrat who is to preside over the party's August convention, said she would "step in" if there is no resolution by late June about Florida and Michigan.
"Because we cannot take this fight to the convention. It must be over before then," Pelosi told the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board. "I believe it will be over in two weeks."
Reid said he had spoken with both Pelosi and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean in a bid to bring closure well before the Denver convention.
"We all are going to urge our folks next week to make a decision very quickly," Reid told KGO radio in San Francisco.
According to the Obama campaign, he needs just 43 more delegates to reach the current winning line of 2,026.
While that number could go up depending on a Florida-Michigan fix this weekend, both candidates would still need support from enough party grandees known as "superdelegates" to go over the top. But Obama would need far fewer.
In any case, in recent weeks, both McCain and Obama have been pummeling each other and leaving Clinton largely out of the debate as the contours of a general election battle take shape.
Obama, who has used the Iraq war to taint McCain by association with President George W. Bush, told The New York Times he was considering an overseas trip this summer after securing the Democratic nod.
"Iraq would obviously be at the top of the list of stops," the Democrat said, while scorning McCain's offer of a joint trip as a "political stunt," as the Republican hammered his plans to pull most US troops out of Iraq.
Obama won surprising plaudits from media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose keen nose for the political winds saw him abandon Britain's Conservatives for Labour's Tony Blair in the 1990s.
"You have possibly the making of a phenomenon in this country," the News Corp. boss said at an industry conference in California Wednesday, describing Obama as a "rock star" while stressing that McCain "has a lot of problems."