Hillary struggles to hang on in Democratic race: Obama wins big in North Carolina

Barack Obama moved into a commanding lead in the Democratic presidential race on Wednesday, and Hillary Clinton's campaign said she loaned her struggling bid $6.4 million over the last month to stay alive.
Obama's big win in North Carolina and Clinton's slim victory in Indiana helped the Illinois senator widen his edge in the Democratic duel for the right to face Republican John McCain in the November presidential election with just six contests remaining.
Clinton loaned her campaign $6.4 million out of her pocket over the past month to try to keep pace with Obama, including $1.4 million in the past week, aides said. It was the second time she has dipped into her personal fortune to fund her presidential bid.
"She did this in order to remain competitive with Senator Obama on television," Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said. "The loans are a sign of Senator Clinton's commitment to the race, commitment to continuing the process and a commitment to being competitive with Senator Obama." Wolfson and other aides shrugged off predictions that Tuesday's results doomed Clinton to eventual defeat.
"The reality is that many pundits have counted Senator Clinton out many times during this contest," Wolfson said. "We believe ultimately that voters are more important than pundits."
Both candidates looked ahead to contests in West Virginia on Tuesday and in Oregon and Kentucky a week later, but Clinton is running out of opportunities to change the course of the race. "We have seen that it's possible to overcome the politics of division and distraction, that it's possible to overcome the same old negative attacks that are always about scoring points and never about solving our problems," Obama said at a victory rally in Raleigh, North Carolina.
His 14-point victory in North Carolina was a dramatic comeback from a difficult campaign stretch that began last month with a big loss in Pennsylvania and was prolonged by the controversy over racially charged comments by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
The results meant Clinton missed her best chance to narrow Obama's lead in pledged delegates who will help pick the nominee at the Democratic Party's August convention. "This fall, we intend to march forward as one Democratic Party, united by a common vision for this country," said Obama, 46, who would be the first black US president.
Clinton won Indiana by fewer than 23,000 votes out of more than 1.25 million cast, taking the state by 51 percent to 49 percent. She had hoped to win the state by a bigger margin but vowed to keep up the fight. "It's full speed on to the White House," the New York senator said at a victory rally in Indianapolis, with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, standing behind her. "We've got a long road ahead but we're going to keep fighting."
The 60-year-old former first lady, who would be the country's first woman president, asked the Indianapolis crowd for donations to keep alive her campaign, which has been heavily outspent by Obama.
Early on Wednesday, Clinton headed to West Virginia where polls show she is in the lead. "For too long, we've let places like West Virginia and Kentucky slip out of the Democratic column ... I intend to win them in November in the general election," she said on Tuesday.
An MSNBC count showed Tuesday's results expanded Obama's delegate edge by nine. He has 1,876 delegates to Clinton's 1,729 - still short of the 2,025 needed to clinch the nomination.
But neither candidate can win without help from superdelegates - nearly 800 party insiders and officials who are free to back any candidate - and the results in the two states undermined Clinton's argument that she is the candidate with the best chance to beat McCain in November.
With just 217 delegates at stake in the last six contests, Clinton has no realistic chance to overtake Obama's lead in pledged delegates or in popular votes won in the state-by-state battle for the nomination that began in January.
"We're nearing the finish line," Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod told reporters. "I think we've taken another big step down the road here to ending this contest and beginning the general election campaign."
Clinton still hopes to find a way to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida, where she won contests in January that are not recognised by the national party because of a dispute over when they were held.