Trickle of superdelegates turns to surge for Obama

The first announcement came just after dawn Tuesday: A Michigan superdelegate had pledged her support to Barack Obama.

Within hours, a dozen more superdelegates followed suit. Then another dozen. By late afternoon, Obama was just eight delegates short of the 2,118 needed to capture the Democratic nomination for president.

After months of resisting pressure to take sides, superdelegates from Missouri, New York, Ohio and elsewhere across the nation fell into line behind Obama on Tuesday in a choreographed effort to settle his epic battle against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The groundswell was enough to crown the Illinois senator as the party’s White House nominee, and the question of how Democrats would make history -- by nominating the first woman or the first African American from a major party for president -- was answered.

“One campaign season is ending tonight, and another is beginning,” Obama strategist David Axelrod told reporters on the way to the candidate’s celebration here.

It was a painstaking effort to turn the slow, day-by-day drift of superdelegates toward Obama into a final daylong surge that settled the race just as voters cast the last ballots of the nominating season in South Dakota and Montana.

As late as Tuesday morning, Obama was making phone calls to court superdelegates, the party and elected officials whose support he needed to break the stalemate.

Many of them “respected both candidates and didn’t want to make their decisions before the end of this process, and we’ve been talking to them all along,” Axelrod said.

“We’ve gone back to them in the last few days and talked to them about whether they were ready now, and many of them were,” he said.

Still, the staging was evident, most of all when Obama’s campaign announced a burst of more than two dozen new superdelegates just minutes before he walked on stage here in an arena packed with 17,000 cheering supporters.

Many who turned Obama’s way were members of Congress. Among them was Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, who announced she was switching from Clinton with not a word of praise for the New York senator and former first lady.

On Capitol Hill, Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois led Obama’s effort to round up support from House Democrats. Pressure on superdelegates mounted last week, she said, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada began asking the uncommitted to take sides soon after Tuesday’s primaries.

When Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democratic leader, abandoned his public neutrality Tuesday and endorsed Obama, it was a sign the end was near.

“Obviously we expected that when the die was cast and the hour was at hand that there would be a surge,” Schakowsky said. “That’s exactly what happened. Clyburn making his decision gave confidence to a number of members here that the time has come.”

Clyburn, one of the nation’s most influential black politicians, said it was fitting that Obama’s August address to the Democratic National Convention in Denver would occur on the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

“That to me is history worth living for,” said Clyburn, who credited Obama with expanding the map of states that a Democratic presidential nominee could win in the general election. “He has energized voters like I have not seen since the 1960s.”

As the final superdelegates fell into place Tuesday, Obama did a closing round of TV and radio interviews with stations in Montana and South Dakota.

He also played basketball with aides in Chicago, an election day tradition for Obama.

At the campaign’s headquarters in a downtown skyscraper, a bustling room where most of the hundreds of workers appeared to be less than 30 years old, a sign by the elevator greeted visitors with the news:

“We got it!!” someone had scrawled on a white easel. “Next election day: Nov. 4.”

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michael.finnegan@latimes.com

janet.hook@latimes.com

Finnegan reported from St. Paul and Chicago. Hook reported from Washington.