Although Democrats saluted Obama's win and called for unity, many seemed fixated on not offending Clinton. Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado endorsed Obama by a press release, which buried the news below a paragraph praising the New York senator. Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, whose name has surfaced on vice-presidential lists, said he wasn't quite ready to declare his allegiance. "We're sorting all that out," Webb told reporters as he hurried into the Senate chamber.
Party leaders issued an early-morning statement that was so vague it could have been written a month ago. Without acknowledging Obama's delegate victory, it asserted that "Democrats must now turn our full attention to the general election." The authors were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean and Democratic Governors' Association Chairman Joe Manchin.
When Obama walked onto the Senate floor to vote at around noon, he was greeted by Sen. Joe Lieberman, a political independent who leans Democratic, but who had one hour earlier issued a harsh critique of Obama's AIPAC speech on a Republican conference call. Lieberman, a leading McCain surrogate, has offered to speak at the GOP convention, prompting some of his erstwhile Democratic colleagues to call for booting him from their caucus. Lieberman and Obama stepped to the side of the chamber and had a conversation that lasted considerably longer than the Obama-Clinton exchange.
"We were just talking some politics," Obama later told reporters.
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