McCain clinches GOP nomination, to get Bush nod; Huckabee exits race  John McCain will be the 2008 Republican nominee for the White House, projects CNN, after he apparently swept all four states hosting primaries on Tuesday, enough to clinch the required number of delegates to clinch the nomination. GOP sources said that McCain would meet with, and receieve the endorsement of, President George W. Bush on Wednesday.
Elsewhere, CNN projected shortly after polls closed in Vermont that Sen. Barack Obama won the Democratic primary there.
McCain's aides earlier readied a giant banner bearing the magic number — 1,191 — to serve as a backdrop for an anticipated victory celebration in Dallas. According to CNN, the McCain campaign has balloons set to soar, as they expect to mathematically eliminate the Republican competition once and for all tonight.
Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean released this statement on McCain: "John McCain is out of touch with the issues facing Americans each day. Instead of offering solutions to the high cost of health care, help for the middle class or ideas to create jobs, McCain offers 100 years in Iraq and more of the same Bush budgets that have heaped debt onto our children and damaged our economy. Instead of ending the influence of lobbyists in Washington, he's hired them to run his campaign. The closer voters look at the real McCain record, the more they will realize he cannot be trusted to deliver the change America wants."
Meanwhile, Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton continue to duel in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island in their riveting race for the party's presidential nomination.
Some polling places in Ohio reportedly will stay open for an extended period due to heavy turnout. According to both CNN and MSNBC, the Democratic race was too close to call there.
Obama and Clinton vied for a total of 370 delegates Tuesday.
In his 12th straight victory over the former first lady, Obama won at least eight delegates in Vermont, with seven more still to be awarded. Obama had a total of 1,397 delegates, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates. He picked up three superdelegate endorsements Tuesday,
Clinton had 1,276 delegates going into the primaries. It will take 2,025 delegates to secure the Democratic nomination.
The AP tracks the delegate races by calculating the number of national convention delegates won by candidates in each presidential primary or caucus, based on state and national party rules, and by interviewing unpledged delegates to obtain their preferences.
Most primaries and some caucuses are binding, meaning delegates won by the candidates are pledged to support that candidate at the national conventions this summer.
Political parties in some states, however, use multistep procedures to award national delegates. Typically, such states use local caucuses to elect delegates to state or congressional district conventions, where national delegates are selected. In these states, the AP uses the results from local caucuses to calculate the number of national delegates each candidate will win, if the candidate's level of support at the caucus doesn't change.
Developing...
(with wire reports)
 
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