Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, predicted Sunday that the long-lasting Democratic race would be over soon. The Obama campaign announced Saturday that the Illinois senator now had support from more of the crucial Democratic superdelegates than Mrs. Clinton has.  Referring to the superdelegates, Mr. Axelrod told Fox News, “You’re going to see people making decisions at a rapid pace from this point on.”  But Howard Wolfson, a senior Clinton adviser, struck a feisty note on Fox, saying that if Mr. Obama wanted Mrs. Clinton out of the race, there was a simple way to ensure that: “Beat her. Beat her in West Virginia, beat her in Puerto Rico, beat her in Kentucky.” Mrs. Clinton, of New York, is favored in those coming contests; Mr. Obama holds an edge in the others, in Oregon, Montana and South Dakota.  Already, Mr. McCain and his surrogates have begun seriously squaring off with Mr. Obama and his supporters. Both sides have clashed over Mr. Obama’s suggestion that Mr. McCain had “lost his bearings” for asserting that Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, favored Mr. Obama.  Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent who has endorsed Mr. McCain, assailed Mr. Obama for reacting in what he called an “undeserved and somewhat intemperate” way after Mr. McCain pointed out repeatedly that a Hamas spokesman had said he would welcome Obama’s election.  “The fact that a spokesman for Hamas has said he would welcome the election of Senator Obama really does raise the question of why,” Mr. Lieberman said on CNN. Hamas, he contended, is a proxy of Iran.  Mr. McCain had said that “I think it’s very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States,” referring to Mr. Obama, and added, “I think that people should understand that I would be Hamas’s worst nightmare.”  Mr. Romney, who is considered a possible McCain running mate, sharply criticized Mr. Obama for saying that his administration would be willing to talk to Iran. Asserting that Mr. Obama, if elected, was planning to meet with the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, said on CNN that this was “one more clear example of a person that’s out of his depth when it comes to being the leader of the free world.”  Mr. Obama, in an interview last week with CNN, called Mr. McCain’s remarks “offensive.” He declared himself an “unwavering ally” of Israel and said his attitude toward Hamas — that it is a terrorist organization, as the United States considers it — was no different from McCain’s.  “For him to toss out comments like that, I think, is an example of him losing his bearings,” Mr. Obama said.
John Edwards cautioned that Hillary Rodham Clinton “has to be really careful that she’s not damaging our prospects” by staying in the contest.