PRESIDENTIAL RACE Sen. Kerry increases his lead

ASSOCIATED PRESS
John Kerry established his national appeal to Democrats with commanding victories in far-flung presidential nomination contests from Arizona to Delaware. John Edwards and Wesley Clark denied him a clean sweep in the winnowing race.
Kerry easily prevailed in five states among the seven voting Tuesday in primaries and caucuses, piling delegates into his column and making it ever harder for his rivals to see any way to stop him.
The series drove Joe Lieberman, the vice presidential candidate of 2000, from the race, and imperiled the candidacy of one-time sensation Howard Dean, who set low expectations for the night and did not exceed them.
"Now we will carry this campaign and the cause of a stronger, fairer, more prosperous America to every part of America," Kerry said.
His rivals were running short on the treasure and time to mount that sort of national battle.
Edwards, Clark win
Clark and Edwards were all but ceding the next contests -- Michigan and Washington state on Saturday -- in favor of a showdown with Kerry on Tuesday in Virginia and Tennessee. Dean was falling back to the Wisconsin contest a week after that.
Edwards, a North Carolina senator, went into Tuesday saying he had to win South Carolina, the state of his birth, and he did.
"We won South Carolina in a resounding fashion and won both the African-American and white vote in South Carolina, and we go from here to other states -- Michigan, Virginia and Tennessee," Edwards said.
Clark, a retired NATO supreme allied commander, battled Edwards to a close victory in Oklahoma, an equally crucial test of his viability.
Still, there was no denying Kerry the "Big Mo," as Clark put it.
"This could be over; it could be a long way from over," he said, "and it could be impacted tomorrow by something we don't know about."
Kerry coasted to victory in the five states he won -- Arizona, Delaware, Missouri, New Mexico and North Dakota -- in the first broadly based round of voting in the Democratic primary season.
Delegates
Of the 269 pledged delegates at stake Tuesday night, an AP analysis showed Kerry winning 128; Edwards, 61; Clark, 49; Dean, seven; and Al Sharpton, one; Twenty-three delegates are yet to be allocated. Dennis Kucinich got none.
Kerry won the two states with the most delegates, Missouri and Arizona, while Clark and Edwards divided the next two biggest prizes.
The results pushed Kerry to just over 200 of the 2,162 delegates needed for the nomination, including the superdelegates of lawmakers and party traditionalists. Dean trailed by nearly 90, Edwards by more than 100.
And Kerry demonstrated his strength across the range of Democratic voters, winning big among Hispanics in Arizona and all racial and income groups in Missouri, where he piled up a nearly 2-to-1 win over his nearest rival, Edwards.
Voters surveyed as they left polling places liked the four-term Massachusetts senator for the same reasons mentioned by the Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire who sent him bursting out of the starting gate. They cited his experience and said he seemed most able to beat President Bush.
Kerry got at least half the vote in Missouri, North Dakota and Delaware, and won by about 15 percentage points in Arizona and New Mexico.
Dropping out
Lieberman, a moderate Connecticut senator whose support for the Iraq war stood out in a Democratic field of war critics, had pinned his last hopes on winning Delaware, where he finished with 11 percent of the vote, a distant second that had just a handful of votes ahead of Edwards and Dean.
"The judgment of the voters is now clear," Lieberman said. "For me, it is now time to make a difficult but realistic decision. I have decided tonight to end my quest for the presidency of the United States of America."
He was the fourth to drop out.
Steve Murphy, former campaign manager for Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt, who quit after the Iowa caucuses, said the race for the nomination was all but settled in his view.
"The only question is who is going to be the last man standing" against Kerry, he said.
Edwards and Clark had hoped to make progress on that question, at least, but it was left unsettled by the split decision in the two states not won by Kerry.
Clark had spent $11 million on TV ads in trying to climb out of the pack; Edwards fell just short in Oklahoma of showing he could win outside the South, trailing Clark by less than 1,000 votes.
Dean saved his money for a last stand in Wisconsin on Feb. 17, a long-shot strategy that some of his own advisers questioned.
"We're going to have a tough night," Dean told supporters as he promised to keep "going and going and going and going and going -- just like the Energizer bunny."
Dean, a former Vermont governor, ran out of cash and momentum after finishing third in Iowa and a distant second in New Hampshire. He ran no TV ads in the seven states at stake Tuesday and intended to stay off the air for a spate of other contests until the Wisconsin vote.
Kerry is racking up endorsements as well as delegates. The 1.2 million-member American Federation of Teachers, the country's second-largest teachers union, planned to come out for Kerry today, a senior union official said on condition of anonymity.