Sen. Barack Obama heads into the general-election campaign with obvious advantages: He is a Democratic candidate running in a sour atmosphere for Republicans, in a contest where voters are hungry for change and coming out of a campaign in which he filled arena after arena with supporters.
Yet while he would like to shift his attention fully to the onslaught already coming from Sen. John McCain and the Republicans, Obama still has problems in his own party that may overshadow everything else until he addresses them: How to repair relations with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her supporters and whether to offer her a spot on the ticket.
Clinton used her final hours of the long primary season to make clear she would be open to being Obama's running mate. If there was ever any hope in Democratic circles that Clinton would let Obama off the hook with an evasion or a flat declaration of no interest, she dashed it Tuesday.
In a speech in New York on Tuesday night, Clinton said she will consult with party leaders and supporters to determine her next steps now that Obama has enough delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination.
"This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight," Clinton told supporters. As she spoke, the crowd chanted "Denver, Denver," referring to the site of the party's convention in August.
Earlier in the day, Clinton told congressional colleagues she would be open to joining Obama's ticket as his vice presidential nominee. But in her speech, the former first lady stopped short of ending or suspending her campaign. She did say she was committed to a united Democratic Party moving forward.
Like her husband, Clinton has a way of becoming the center of attention even when the spotlight is supposed to be trained elsewhere, a reality Obama will no doubt continue to confront no matter how he proceeds.
Until he deals with the Clinton question, it could be hard for Obama to move on to what he would like to achieve next: presenting himself to the entire electorate and not just Democrats, laying out his political ideology before McCain does it on his terms and trying to rectify some of the weaknesses highlighted by the combative primary process.
Much of the cautious optimism in the Obama campaign is based on the expectation this is a turn-the-page election, that deep anger with President Bush, along with malaise over the war in Iraq and the economy, will be channeled into a Democratic victory in November.
But it is not yet clear that those substantive issues will fully trump cultural issues and values — like race, patriotism and class — or the question of whether voters will judge Obama, just a few years out of the Illinois Legislature, to have the experience necessary to sit in the Oval Office.
There would be obvious advantages to an Obama-Clinton ticket. For one thing, it would go far toward healing wounded feelings among Clinton's supporters, especially women. Some of those supporters have suggested they would stay home or vote for McCain, who made an explicit appeal for their support Tuesday night as he tried to increase pressure on Obama. Clinton would provide Obama with some of the foreign policy credentials he needs, bring her own bank of contributors and probably help put more states in play.
"I think the world of both of them," said Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del. "I want to see them run as a team."
Yet, there is clear, if not publicly expressed, apprehension in Obama's circle about the wisdom of asking her to join the ticket. After gaining so much attention by campaigning on a promise of bringing fresh faces to Washington, Obama would be asking voters to put another Clinton in the White House.
Hillary Clinton does not come alone; beyond her own history — and the legions of voters who do not like her — she would bring along former President Bill Clinton, whose baggage might be judged by Obama to outweigh his political skills, especially after a primary season that left Bill Clinton's reputation dented.
And running for president is very much about presenting command and authority. A crucial rule in the vice presidential selection process is to avoid the perception of being pressured into a decision by a potential running mate.
"It's backward looking to pick a Clinton at this point — and he's all about forward looking, to being about change," said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic organization. "He's all about a fundamentally new kind of politics. Picking a Clinton is by definition backward looking, and I just don't think he wants that."
Some Democrats argue that rather than producing a ticket that would be bigger than the sum of its parts, an Obama-Clinton combination might have the opposite effect — by pushing away both groups of voters who are reluctant to vote for an African-American and those who are reluctant to vote for a woman.
Throughout the campaign, Clinton and Obama had a relationship that veered between strained and strange. Obama once referred to her during a debate as "likable enough," while Clinton at one point said she and McCain could offer voters "a lifetime of experience" while Obama "will put forth a speech he made in 2002," a reference to the address in Chicago before he was elected to the Senate in which he came out against the Iraq war.
Inevitably, as the campaign continued, relations between the two sides got worse.
This report includes information from the Associated Press.