WASHINGTON -- Hillary Clinton battled her way to another campaign-saving victory yesterday, stopping Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary but gaining little significant ground on the front-runner.
Her win meant that the Democratic presidential contest would continue for several weeks, possibly until the final primaries in early June
"Today, here in Pennsylvania, you made your voices heard," Clinton told supporters in Philadelphia. "And because of you, the tide is turning."
In a nod to the debts plaguing her candidacy, she delivered a plea for fresh contributions and said that "the future of this campaign is in your hands." Clinton was joined onstage by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and daughter, Chelsea, who made dozens of campaign appearances in the state.
"We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but if you're ready, I'm ready," the New York senator said, casting herself as an underdog against a better-funded rival. "Now, I might stumble and I might get knocked down, but if you'll stand with me, I will always get back up."
The Obama campaign, in a memo to reporters late last night, said the race was "fundamentally unchanged." But Clinton's victory, by roughly a double-digit margin, kept her campaign alive and bought her time to raise new doubts about Obama's candidacy among the superdelegates who will decide the nomination.
Obama failed to get what he wanted from the longest and most expensive single-state campaign since Iowa in early January.
He had hoped to knock Clinton out of the race and build a connection with working-class whites. He outspent her substantially in a six-week campaign that brought him closer to voters than in other states and improved his showing among white men and seniors, but not by nearly enough to win.
"She ran a terrific race," Obama said in a concession speech that claimed to have "closed the gap" on Clinton's early polling lead in Pennsylvania. But Obama still lost by roughly the 10 points that he did in neighboring Ohio in early March.
For her part, Clinton needed a landslide to cut deeply into Obama's delegate lead and substantially narrow his advantage in the popular vote total, a measure she wants the party's superdelegates to consider in choosing a candidate. Based on partial returns, she fell short of that sort of lopsided victory, though she did cut Obama's lead by about 200,000 votes.
