THE battle for the Democratic presidential nomination could be won outright by Barack Obama this week, a senior adviser to the Illinois senator said this weekend.

As support for Hillary Clinton evaporates, former senator Tom Daschle told The Sunday Times: “He’s going to get closer and closer and he could cross the magic threshold as early as [this] week.”

Daschle, known as the Wizard of Oz for his influential, behind-the-curtain role in Obama’s campaign, was speaking in his home state of South Dakota, which will hold the last primary contest with Montana on June 3. He said he expected Clinton to continue in the race until the last votes were counted, but claimed that Obama might already have enough delegates to win the nomination before then.

If so, Daschle will have played a huge role in Obama’s victory over the New York senator, who was once considered a shoo-in for the nomination.

Obama, 46, described Daschle affectionately this weekend as an “early investor” in his campaign. “I could not have a better friend or greater supporter. He was on board when nobody gave me a chance and has been with me through thick and thin,” he said.

Daschle, 60, was the leader of the Democrats in the Senate with presidential ambitions when he lost his seat in the 2004 election. He advised Obama to seize the chance for a White House run while other wise heads cautioned him to wait.

“I took a lesson from my own life,” Daschle said. “I decided not to run for president four years ago and fate took its turn. I told him, ‘Don’t expect to have another window like this’.”

After his defeat, Daschle transferred some of his best Senate staff and campaigners to Obama, then an inexperienced new senator, including Peter Rouse, who became his chief of staff, and Steve Hildebrand, the master-mind of Obama’s triumph in Iowa and other caucus states. “We kept it in the family,” Daschle said.

The Obama campaign’s nimble electoral tactics caught Clinton’s powerful but rusty machine off guard and helped to build up his unassailable lead in the number of pledged delegates who select the nominee at the Democratic party convention in August.

When Oregon and Kentucky go to the polls on Tuesday, Obama is certain to gain enough delegates to grant him a majority of the 3,253 pledged delegates even if he performs poorly, as expected, in Bible-belt Kentucky. He needs only 132 more pledged delegates and superdelegates to clinch the nomination.

He intends to celebrate at a rally in Iowa, the scene of his first victory, bringing his campaign symbolically to a close.

At that point the daily trickle of superdelegates - the party leaders with a casting vote at the convention - could turn into a flood.

Obama has Daschle to thank for his thick contacts book and ability to charm superdelegates off the fence.

“We’re not counting on it,” Daschle added cautiously. “There will be a lot of celebrating and rightly so whenever it happens, but we’ll wait for the convention for the final declaration of victory.”

At a rally in a sawdust-filled barn in Watertown, South Dakota, Obama admitted: “We’ve got a little more work to do.” But he aimed his fire at McCain, accusing him of “hypocrisy and fear-peddling” in foreign policy, without once mentioning his Democratic rival. There had been concern that Obama was stuck in electoral no man’s land while John McCain, the Republican nominee, took shots at him.

“At some point along the way, Hillary Clinton became ‘poor Hillary’ and it stuck,” The Washington Post reported last week. The paper explored how the doughty fighter and would-be first woman president has come to be described with the same pitying condescension that marked her years as first lady, when Bill Clinton’s infidelities were exposed.

In a sign that the reality of defeat is sinking in, Clinton spent the previous day in South Dakota talking to her farming audience almost exclusively about rural affairs instead of attacking Obama.

One of her supporters brought her two sons to see Obama. Ash-ley Morris, 34, a nurse, said: “I’d like to see a female president, but I know she won’t make it. She’s too far behind. I brought the boys because maybe some day Obama will be a famous president and they’ll be able to say, ‘We saw him’.”

Clinton also defended Obama in the face of President George W Bush’s broadside in the Knes-set, the Israeli parliament, against the “appeasers” who wanted to talk to “terrorists and radicals”. It was clearly directed at Obama.

“It was a very encouraging sign that she criticised Bush,” said Daschle, who is hoping that Clinton will make a graceful exit.

Prominent supporters of Clinton also rallied to Obama’s defence, indicating that the party was closing ranks around the likely nominee. Clinton’s fantasy that she could somehow persuade the superdelegates to back her against the wishes of the majority of pledged delegates collapsed last week when the former presidential candidate John Edwards endorsed Obama.

It put paid to any lingering doubts that Obama would win the nomination, even though he had just been trounced by Clinton in the West Virginia primary.

The late-night comedian Jay Leno joked cruelly that Clinton was the “big winner of West Virginia, which means that one day she could be president of . . . West Virginia.”

Edwards thrilled a huge crowd in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when he declared: “The Democrat voters of America have made their choice, and so have I.” The day after his coveted endorsement, seven of his pledged delegates transferred their loyalty to Obama, bringing the prospect of victory that much nearer.

As if to confirm Obama’s impending win, McCain concentrated his fire on the Illinois senator last week, joining in Bush’s attack on him for being soft on terror and too willing to talk to the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who recently described Israel as a “stinking corpse”.

“What is it that he wants to talk about?” McCain scoffed. When John Kerry ran for president in 2004, he was depicted as unAmerican for turning against the Iraq war. McCain last week accused Obama of being the preferred candidate of Hamas, the radical Islamic Palestinian group (although Obama insists he would not negotiate with them).

Obama, who began wearing a patriotic American flag pin on his lapel last week, told The Sunday Times on his campaign plane that he did not consider foreigners’ support for his candidacy to be a hindrance back home.

“If they don’t have a vote, then it’s not going to help me win a general election,” he said. “On the other hand it might help me as president, as I govern and try to bring alliances that have been frayed over the last eight years back together. One of the things I’m looking forward to is reaching out all around the world and doing repair work.”

He also cast himself last week as a foreign policy realist in the mould of the President George H Bush, saying he had “enormous sympathy” for the elder Bush’s policies. “I don’t have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm (the first Gulf war). I don’t have a lot of complaints with their handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he said.

Daschle believes the political climate today is very different from 2004, when there was considerable support for the Iraq war and he lost his seat. “Given the concern people have about the decline in America’s standing in the world, the fact that Obama is so popular in other countries is likely to be viewed much more favourably,” he said.

However, Republicans are determined to besmirch Obama as much as they can for being weak on national security.

David Bossie of Citizens United, a conservative attack group that is spending $10m on an antiObama documentary and advertising campaign against him, said his organisation was turning its attention to Obama’s thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament, written in 1983 - a year of huge antinuclear protests - while he was an undergraduate at Columbia University.

“We’re trying to uncover new material and issues that haven’t been talked about,” said Bossie. “I find it very intriguing that his thesis was written at the height of the cold war at a time when we know from his own memoir that he was influenced by the left.”

Columbia University claimed to have no record of the thesis, which it could not, in any case, release without permission. However, Michael Baron, Obama’s former thesis adviser, said he could “guarantee” there was nothing in it that could damage him.

“I don’t think it will cause him any harm whatsoever,” said Baron, who remembered awarding Obama an A grade. “It was a very nonideological course. The purpose was to present a balanced paper, not to take sides or to state that this solution was right or wrong.”

Bossie said he was astonished that Clinton’s campaign had not made more early on of issues such as the nuclear disarmament thesis, and Obama’s associations with Tony Rezko, an indicted financier, Jeremiah Wright, his radical former pastor, or William Ayers, the former leader of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group. “I suppose it was a case of people in glass houses not wanting to throw stones,” he said.

The Clinton camp failed to appreciate the seriousness of Obama’s challenge until it was too late. In particular, it overlooked his ability to rack up huge victories in caucuses that were largely dominated by party activists, while she concentrated on winning primaries in big states that yielded few pledged delegate gains under the party’s system of proportional representation.

As a result, the Democratic party looks set to fight the 2008 election under the leadership of a charismatic candidate with proven weaknesses among white, blue-collar workers and Hispanics in several key swing states. Despite Obama’s strength in the national polls, McCain leads him by a small margin in Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin and is not far behind in Pennsylvania.

Clinton won all but one of the primaries in these states, although the status of the delegations from Florida and Michigan is in dispute after they broke party rules by holding their contests early. Neither candidate campaigned in Florida and Obama’s name was not on the ballot in Michigan. Some voters said they resented Clinton’s attempt to pocket their votes.

Jerry Pearson, 50, a limousine driver from Detroit, said: “I wanted to vote for Obama but I didn’t bother because he wasn’t on the ballot. She’s cheating. She just stuck her chest out and said, ‘I’m going to win’. Yes, well, we’ll see.”

A source on the rules and bylaws committee, which meets on May 31 to decide what to do about Florida and Michigan, said there was likely to be a compromise that would benefit Obama. Even if Clinton had her wish and the delegations were seated in full, she is so far behind Obama in the delegate count it would no longer make the difference between victory and defeat.

Obama will head to Florida immediately after this Tuesday’s contests to try to shore up his support.

“He’s going to be campaigning hard in the swing states and have a very visible presence there,” Daschle predicted. “You’ll see him extensively in Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan and Florida. We think we’re going to be in a good position against McCain when Obama focuses on his differences with him.” First, however, Clinton has to be shown the door.

Obama was a little more reluctant than Daschle to anticipate victory this week. Asked if he would declare victory when he won a majority of pledged delegates, he responded drily: “We will declare we have a majority of pledged delegates.” It cannot be long before the superdelegates follow.

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