Barack Obama stepped to the brink of victory in the Democratic presidential race Tuesday night, defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Oregon primary and moving within 100 delegates of the total he needs to claim the prize at the party convention this summer.

Speaking to some 6,000 supporters at an outdoor rally with the Iowa Statehouse as a backdrop, the Illinois senator pointed to a campaign where few gave him much of chance of winning when he started the journey a year and a half ago. He is now the likely nominee.

"Tonight, in the fullness of spring, with the help of those who stood up from Portland to Louisville, we have returned to Iowa with a majority of delegates elected by the American people and you have put us within reach of the Democratic nomination for president of the United States of America," he told cheering supporters in Iowa, the overwhelmingly white state that launched him, a black, first-term senator from Illinois, on his improbable path to victory last January.

While Clinton had another strong showing in Kentucky, similar to last week’s victory in West Virginia, and has done well in the late primaries, Obama has stayed ahead in the race, steadily racking up national convention delegates.

Clinton won at least 47 delegates in the two states and Obama won at least 32, according to an analysis of election returns by The Associated Press. All the Kentucky delegates were awarded, but there were still 24 to be allocated in Oregon, and Obama was in line for many of them.

He had 1,949 delegates overall, out of 2026 needed for the nomination. Clinton had 1,769 according the latest tally by the AP.

Obama's total includes more than a majority of the delegates picked in the 56 primaries and caucuses on the calendar, a group that excludes nearly 800 superdelegates, the party leaders who hold the balance of power at the convention.

At press time, with about 50 percent of the votes counted in Oregon's unique mail-in primary, Obama was gaining a 58 percent share to 42 percent for Clinton. The final tallies for the former first lady's victory in Kentucky was 65 percent to 30 percent.

Fundraisers for the two campaigns have met quietly to build a strategy for the fall campaign, AP reported.

"You are Democrats who are tired of being divided, Republicans who no longer recognize the party that runs Washington, independents who are hungry for change," Obama said Tuesday night, speaking to a crowd on the grounds of the Iowa Capitol in Des Moines as well as the millions around the country who will elect the nation's 44th president in November.

Clinton countered with a lopsided win in Kentucky, a victory with scant political value in a race moving inexorably in Obama's direction.

The former first lady vowed to remain in the race, telling supporters, "I'm more than determined than ever to see that every vote is cast and every ballot is counted."

But in a sign of confidence on the front-runner's part, party officials said discussions were under way to send Paul Tewes, a top Obama campaign aide, to the Democratic National Committee to oversee operations for the fall campaign.

The real contest is figuring out how Clinton will bow out of the race. With Obama having amassed the majority of pledged delegates to all but seal the Democratic nomination, rumors began spreading that Clinton may try to go out on a high note following a victory in Kentucky and could withdraw from the race as early as Wednesday.

The more likely scenario, however, is that Clinton will remain in the race through the last primaries in Montana and South Dakota on June 3 before pulling out, said David Bositis, senior analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

“She’ll likely concede in June after all the contests have run” and then throw her support behind Obama, Bositis told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

“She and her people are already making arguments that this campaign was really good and important for Obama, in that it toughened him up for the general election,” Bositis said. “When they say something like that, they are conceding that they are not going to win, but secondly, they also are trying to make a point that what they did, from the Democratic point of view, was good, like they want it to be thought of positively by the Democrats.”

Bositis said it is unlikely to hurt Obama.

“I think that so long as Hillary isn’t attacking Obama -- and she’s not anymore -- there’s nothing wrong with letting this go to the end, because the states that haven’t voted yet are going to get their chance to vote and these states will have a chance to get organized,” something the Republicans haven’t done by wrapping up their nominating process so early, Bositis said.

There are now just 76 delegates left to be awarded in Democratic primaries: 55 in Puerto Rico on June 1; 15 in South Dakota on June 3 and 16 in Montana on June 3.

“In a lot of these (primary) contests, McCain hasn’t really done anything in those states," Bositis said. "In Pennsylvania, a lot of Republicans were voting for Ron Paul or Mike Huckabee, so John McCain and the Republicans are not doing anything in those states, and the Democrats are organizing those states and getting people registered to vote and charged up for the fall.”

In Kentucky, Clinton again won a largely white, working class state, as she did in West Virginia the week before. About nine out of 10 voters were white, exit polls showed. Obama, however, basically conceded those states to Clinton, not campaigning as heavily there as he did in other states, leading some voters to suggest that Obama’s lack of success was due more to his being an unknown quantity rather than the race factor.

Kentucky also was among the least liberal states polled in the Democratic campaign; Oregon among the most liberal. One of three Kentucky voters called themselves liberal; twice as many claimed the label in Oregon, where 75,000 people showed up to see Obama over the weekend in the largest rally of the campaign.

There, voters chose Obama, “not because of who he isn’t, but because of who he is,” said Renee Mitchell, a columnist at The Oregonian newspaper in Portland.

Mitchell said Obama has created real excitement in the region. And although the rest of the state is fairly conservative, she said, Obama stands a chance because Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, has a real liability in being so closely linked to President Bush.

Instead of providing a boost, the president may instead be a major drag on McCain.

“McCain is in bad shape,” Bositis said. “He’s stuck with Bush, and being stuck with Bush is not a place someone wants to be these days.”

A recent CNN survey said 31 percent of Americans approve of how the president is doing his job. The American Research Group, however, reported its survey gave Bush a 28 percent approval rating, up from 22 percent in April and a low of 19 percent in February.

Last week, Bush spoke before the Israeli parliament and implied that Obama’s willingness to speak with controversial foreign leaders without preconditions, including Iran’s Preisident Mahmoud Ahmdinejad and Cuban President Raul Castro, made him an “appeaser.” McCain quickly followed suit, calling Obama’s foreign policy judgment into question, but the maneuver backfired, Bositis said.

“(McCain) thought that this was going to be a plus for him, but all it did was associate him with Bush," he said. "What Obama’s campaign is going to say is John McCain is George Bush. Nobody is more unpopular around the country than George Bush. If McCain wants to go around and associate himself with George Bush, then the Obama campaign is going to say, ‘Okay.’”