CLINTON SOUNDS NOTE OF DEFIANCE !

By Jamie Coomarasamy - BBC News, Charleston, West Virginia

Hillary Clinton delivered a defiant victory speech. The contrast couldn't have been greater. A week ago, in Indianapolis, I had watched Hillary Clinton's victory party run its full course, well before the New York Senator's narrow win in that night's Indiana primary had been officially confirmed.
Here in Charleston, West Virginia, most of the Clinton partygoers were still queuing outside the venue, the Civic Center, when the result was called by the US networks.
If last week's victory was a squeak, this week's was a roar. A two-to-one win over Barack Obama in a state which - as Senator Clinton has frequently reminded her supporters - no successful Democratic candidate for the White House has lost in nearly a century. And that includes, of course, her husband, Bill.
Her most recent reminder came in a victory speech that was more defiant in tone than the one she had given in Indianapolis last week.
Standing alone on stage, she used the kind of metaphors that might be expected in the Mountain State. The people of West Virginia, she said, knew about "the rough roads to the top of the mountain".

The New York Senator said she owed it to her supporters to stay. Indianna And she made it clear that she intended to stay in the primary contest until the last votes were cast - not only because she owed it to her millions of supporters across the country but, more importantly, because she still believed that she was the strongest candidate, the best-placed Democrat to win the crucial swing states in November's general election.
Criticising what she called "the pundits and the nay sayers", who had pronounced her campaign dead after last week's results, she directed her remarks - rather more explicitly than in the past, it seemed - at those uncommitted super-delegates, the party officials whose votes will decide the nomination.
She called on them to exercise their "awesome responsibility" carefully, to weigh up which of the two remaining candidates was best placed to win in the general election.
So can she convince enough of them to publicly support her, or even to defect from Barack Obama's camp? Her victories in the recent Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana primaries haven't achieved that goal, which, as her campaign manager, Terry McAuliffe admitted, is her only realistic path to victory.
In fact, she has continued to lose support from those crucial super-delegates over the past few weeks. This has prompted supposedly neutral figures in the party to begin referring to Barack Obama as the Democrats' "likely nominee".

Can Hillary Clinton take super-delegates from Barack Obama? But West Virginia provided a good example of one of the hurdles that the Illinois Senator will face should he stop being the party's almost-presumptive nominee and become its actual candidate.
In the coal mining town of Logan, where Senator Clinton made one of her last campaign stops before election day, Democratic voters spoke openly about their reluctance to vote for an African-American.
Several said they might switch their allegiance to the Republican candidate John McCain, if Hillary Clinton didn't prevail in the nominating process.
The exit polls seem to confirm that tendency. Around a fifth of the state's predominantly white Democratic primary voters admitted that the issue of race had played a role in their choice of candidate. This was a higher figure than in almost any other state.
Of course, it's hard to tell how many of those voters really will break with generations-old Democratic traditions and favour Mr McCain in November, but it's safe to assume that some will.
Among them, I would guess, will be 77-year-old Miss Hale, who told me in Yesterdays diner in Logan that she didn't like Obama's "Muslim faith" and Eugene, who casually mentioned - as he was sitting in the barber's chair - that his father didn't want blacks in his house, let alone in the White House.

BBC NEWS REPORT.