The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Washington

Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were set Wednesday for six weeks of trench warfare as their increasingly bitter White House race headed on to April's Pennsylvania primary.

Obama won by a landslide on Tuesday in Mississippi, riding huge support from African-Americans, after a new race row rocked their battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"We did very well in Wyoming. We did great in Mississippi. And so we've now basically recovered whatever delegates we may have lost in Texas and Ohio. And we've got a substantial lead," Obama said on NBC "Today Show."

The Illinois senator ridiculed assertions by Clinton supporter and 1984 vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, who put Obama's stunning rise in big-time US politics down to his race.

He said "if you were to get a handbook on what's the path to the presidency, I don't think that the handbook would start by saying, 'Be an African-American named Barack Obama.'"

"I mean, I don't think that would be generally considered an advantage. And it certainly wasn't when I was running for the United States Senate or the presidency," he said.

Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams congratulated Obama on his Mississippi win and looked forward to Pennsylvania and beyond, but there was no immediate comment from the candidate herself.

In a letter to the Obama campaign, Williams also pressed for new primaries in Florida and Michigan. Clinton won the two states in January, but they broke party rules by advancing their primaries and so lost their delegates.

"With the campaign now entering the final phase of the nominating contest, it is vital that both of our campaigns come together to ensure that the delegations from

Florida and Michigan be seated to reflect the will of the voters," she said.

The Illinois senator punched back with his second win in a row since the former first lady's campaign-saving wins in Texas and Ohio last week, which halted his own 12-contest win streak and extended their epic struggle.

Clinton is already campaigning hard in Pennsylvania, a blue-collar state whose economic problems mirror places like Ohio. The state will elect 188 delegates, the biggest haul remaining in the Democratic contest.

Obama now leads by about 120 delegates after 46 primaries and caucuses, but neither candidate can reach the winning line of 2,025 without the backing of party grandees called "superdelegates."

Mississippi did not change the race, but allowed Obama to pad his lead in the hunt for nominating delegates who will head to the Democrats' August presidential convention in Denver.

With its 33 nominating delegates, conservative, Deep South Mississippi, reliably Republican in general elections, was the last showdown in the Democratic race before the more significant Pennsylvania primary on April 22.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting in Mississippi, Obama won 61 percent of the vote compared to 37 percent for Clinton.

Television exit polls showed a large racial divide: half of the Democratic electorate was African Americans, nine in ten of whom went for Obama, according to MSNBC figures.

Republicans also voted in Mississippi.

But as Senator John McCain has already clinched enough delegates to be the party's standard-bearer in the November presidential election, there was little question about the outcome. McCain won with 79 percent of the vote.

The latest racially tinged row of an increasingly ugly Democratic campaign raged after Ferraro told a California newspaper: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."

The first African-American with a viable shot at the White House, Obama called the remarks by the trailblazing Democrat "patently absurd," and his campaign demanded that Clinton fire Ferraro from her finance committee.

New York Senator Clinton said she did "not agree" with the comments and found it "regrettable" that supporters might resort to personal attacks, but did not cut Ferraro loose.

"We ought to keep this focused on the issues. That's what this campaign should be about," she said in Pennsylvania.

Appearing on Wednesday morning talk shows, Ferraro accused Obama aides of twisting her remarks to make her sound like a racist, and stood by her belief that Obama's rise owed everything to his race.