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Hillary Clinton celebrated her election victories yesterday with hints about forming a joint Democratic party ticket with Barack Obama.

The morning after her hat-trick of wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island, she made a tour of morning TV shows and suggested that she could ask Mr Obama to be her running mate in November’s general election against the Republican nominee-elect John McCain. She acknowledged that many Democrats dreamed of them teaming up at the end of their titanic presidential struggle.

“That may, you know, be where this is headed,” she added, “but of course we have to decide who’s on the top of ticket. I think that the people of Ohio very clearly said that it should be me.”

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Her comments reflected her determination to carry on fighting — tooth and claw — through the next big contest in Pennsylvania on April 22 and all the way to the Democratic convention in August. Although her wins in Ohio and Texas have halted Mr Obama’s momentum, he spent yesterday pointing out that they had scarcely dented his three-figure lead in elected delegates.

For Mrs Clinton to wrest the nomination from him, she must cultivate the seed of doubt sown by her campaign about her opponent’s electability and character. Even then she would probably have to persuade the party’s elite of super-delegates that they should defy the will of voters in primaries and caucuses who have favoured her rival.

Some of his supporters have already talked about such a scenario triggering “a riot” at the party convention.

The prospect of a drawn-out and destructive Democratic battle is causing palpitations in the party leadership who will have watched with alarm Mr McCain being anointed at the White House as the Republican standard-bearer by President Bush yesterday.

Mr McCain was late for his lunch date and kept Mr Bush waiting. He knows he now has seven months to unite his party and prepare for what he described as “the big battle to come” — against a possibly wounded Democratic opponent. Mrs Clinton wasted no time yesterday in again attacking Mr Obama’s credentials to be Commander-in-Chief or handle a global crisis. She said voters were “starting to ask some hard questions, [they] want this race to go on because they are now really concerned about who can best go against Senator McCain”. She contrasted “a lifetime of experience for John McCain and a lifetime of experience for me,” against Mr Obama’s claim to have better judgment because he made “one speech” opposing the war in Iraq.

Her campaign issued a memo stating: “The vetting of Obama has just begun. The corruption trial of Tony Rezko is getting under way this week, yet many questions about Obama’s relationship with him remain unanswered. If the primary contest ends prematurely and Obama is the nominee, Democrats may have a nominee who will be a lightning rod of controversy.”

In interviews yesterday Mr Obama was at pains to praise Mrs Clinton as a tenacious opponent, while saying: “It is premature to talk about a joint ticket.”

He later sent a message to supporters, saying: “We knew that the closer we got to the change we seek, the more we’d see of the politics we’re trying to end — the attacks and distortions that try to distract us from the issues that matter to people’s lives.”

His campaign is already preparing to return Mrs Clinton’s fire, raising questions about her failure to disclose tax records or the source of donations to Bill Clinton’s presidential library.

David Axelrod, Mr Obama’s chief strategist, said: “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If she wants to make issues like ethics and disclosure and law firms and real estate deals and all that stuff, as I’ve said before, I don’t know why they’d want to go there.”

Yesterday there was little sign of the deluge of super-delegates who had been expected to endorse Mr Obama if he had done better in Texas and Ohio. Instead, Mrs Clinton was emphasising how important it was that they should “take on board” the doubts being raised about Mr Obama’s capacity to win back the White House.

Her campaign is also piling pressure on the Democratic National Committee to rethink a ban imposed on delegates from Florida and Michigan as punishment for holding primaries before February. Mrs Clinton won both contests.

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