US Senator Barack Obama's quest for the US presidency was expected to receive a major boost Monday as leading Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy planned to formally endorse his White House bid.
The veteran lawmaker from Massachusetts was to make his announcement at a rally at Washington's American University on Monday, accompanied by his niece Caroline, daughter of the late president John F. Kennedy, Democratic Party sources told AFP.
The unexpected support from the dean of the party's liberal wing came as a slap in the face to national front-runner Hillary Clinton amid reports that Kennedy turned down an appeal for backing from former president and longtime ally Bill Clinton.
The news came a day after the 46-year-old Illinois senator defeated rival Clinton in the South Carolina state primary.
Obama said Sunday his two-to-one margin over Clinton in Saturday's contest in the heavily black southern state demonstrated that Americans want to transcend racial and partisan divisions.
"I think people want change. I think they want to get beyond some of the racial politics that, you know, has been so dominant in the past," he said on ABC television.
After a tense battle splashed with accusations of "race-baiting," Obama swept the field with 55 percent of the vote against Clinton's 27 percent and ex-senator John Edwards' 18 percent.
New York Senator Clinton meanwhile defended her husband Bill, whose avid campaigning was blamed for racial polarization and, in some post-vote analyses, for her poor showing.
"Maybe he got a little carried away," Clinton said of the former president. "It also comes with sleep deprivation which, you know, I think is marking all of us, our families, our supporters," she told CBS.
Although exit polls showed a clear slant among white voters for Clinton and Edwards, Obama said his victory showed that people rejected the nasty politics of the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was president.
"In the '90s, we got caught up in a slash and burn politics that the American people are weary of," Obama said.
Obama's remarks came as the close-fought campaign looked toward the vast "Super Tuesday" vote of February 5, when more than 20 states vote in both Democratic and Republican primaries, and which could determine the candidates for the November 4 presidential election.
While Obama was in Georgia Sunday, Clinton moved to Tennessee where she addressed a black church congregation. Both have two state nominating contests under their belts, all in states with small numbers of delegates to the party's Denver national nominating convention.
Clinton then headed to Florida where her campaign expects to get a spurt of news coverage from an expected victory which could diminish Obama's momentum and give her a jolt going into Super Tuesday.
Her campaign Clinton released a statement from Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former Maryland lieutenant governor and daughter of slain Robert Kennedy, saying she and her siblings, Bobby Kennedy and Kerry Kennedy, backed the New York senator.
Obama could have a challenge winning solid support from Hispanic voters there, some analysts believe. "The Hispanic voter ... has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates," analyst Sergio Bendixen told The New Yorker.
In the race for the Republican nomination, tensions rose ahead of the Florida's primary Tuesday, in which Senator John McCain is closely matched with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
Romney lashed out Sunday over McCain's accusation that he had advocated a pullout from Iraq "similar to what the Democrats are seeking, which would have led to the victory by Al-Qaeda."
"Everybody who's looked at what he said has found it to be completely misleading and inaccurate. It's dishonest," said Romney, seeking to burnish his national security credentials in front of Florida's conservatives.
Meanwhile Rudy Giuliani, the former national Republican front-runner who has pinned his campaign on a Florida victory, saw his hopes sink further when a new poll showed him running fourth in the state.
A Zogby poll Sunday put McCain and Romney tied at 30 percent, Mike Huckabee at 14 percent and Giuliani at 13 percent.
