Obama's focus 'on general election'
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is to focus more attention on November's general election fight with Republican John McCain, campaign aides have said.
It comes after a strong performance in the last major contests of the US primary season
The Illinois senator, who would be America's first black presidential nominee, beat rival Hillary Clinton by 14 percentage points in North Carolina, while the former first lady clinched a victory by just two points in Indiana.
As US media outlets hailed "the beginning of the end" as "Obama cruises; Clinton clings", Mr Obama's strategist David Axelrod said Mr McCain had been able to "run free for some time now" because of the prolonged battled for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
"I don't think we're going to spend time solely in primary states," he said, as Mr Obama, 46, took a rare rest day in Chicago. "We have multiple tasks here."
Mr Obama climbed within 200 delegates of clinching the nomination after Tuesday night's results and the latest Associated Press figures show he now leads Mrs Clinton by 1840.5 delegates to 1,688.
Campaign aides also said the figures left little path for a Clinton comeback and made broad suggestions that it was time for the 270 remaining unaligned superdelegates - almost 800 party leaders and others who will determine the outcome of the race - to get off the fence.
David Plouffe, Mr Obama's campaign manager, added: "We think the Clinton camp has gotten away with a little bit of creating these alternative views of reality."
Meanwhile, as Mrs Clinton immediately returned to the campaign trail in Shepherdstown, West Virginia - which votes next Tuesday - her aides revealed she lent 6.4 million US dollars (£3.2 million) to her ailing campaign in the past month, in addition to the five million US dollar (£2.5 million) loan earlier this year.
The 60-year-old New York senator will stay in the race for now, but many US pundits predicted the end for her campaign was near.
