John Edwards endorses Obama
Edwards, an also-ran in this year's Democratic presidential contest, agrees to support the front-runner. Obama also picks up more superdelegates a day after losing in West Virginia to Hillary Clinton.
Grand Rapids, Mich. -- A day after his landslide defeat in West Virginia's presidential primary, Barack Obama picked up the long-sought endorsement of vanquished Democratic rival John Edwards.
Coming so late in the race for the party nomination, Edwards' support was of limited value to Obama -- but at the very least it helped project an image of the party uniting behind the Illinois senator.
While Obama has all but locked up the nomination, the scale of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's 41-point win in West Virginia sparked new questions about his trouble appealing to white blue-collar voters.
Clinton stands a good chance of defeating Obama again in Kentucky and Puerto Rico, even if she cannot overtake his delegate lead before the nominating contests end on June 3 in Montana and South Dakota.
Obama aides said Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, would appear with the candidate late this afternoon at a rally in Grand Rapids.
After dropping out of the race in January, Obama and Clinton competed fiercely for Edwards' endorsement, but the 2004 vice presidential nominee declined to take sides.
The Edwards announcement came on a daylong Obama campaign swing across Michigan. At a stop in Warren, outside Detroit, Obama all but ignored Clinton while sharply attacking Republican John McCain.
Faulting McCain for advocating extensions of President Bush's tax cuts, Obama said he and the Arizona senator would offer Americans a stark choice in November.
"It's going to be a clear choice between four more years of the same failed Bush policies that have wrecked Michigan's economy, or real change that allows us to write a new chapter in American manufacturing and the American economy and American history," Obama told a couple of hundred invited guests at Macomb County Community College.
The visit to Michigan was the second in a string of trips that Obama has started making to general-election battleground states, on the assumption that Clinton cannot accumulate enough delegates to win the nomination. Obama campaigned Tuesday in Missouri and plans a three-day trip to Florida next week.
McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said weak leadership and poor judgment had led Obama "to make empty promises of billions upon billions in new spending on more government programs when he has no way to pay for it.
