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probable U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama met privately with former rival Hillary Clinton on Thursday night, an Obama campaign orator said.”They did meet tonight,” Robert Gibbs, Obama’s infrastructure director, told reporters in response to media reports about the session.Gibbs said reports they met at Clinton’s home in Washington were wrong. He declined to disclose the location or details of what they discuss.He spoke on the Obama campaign plane traveling to Chicago. Obama had been scheduled to fly back to that city on Thursday evening after a rally in northern Virginia but stayed behind for the conference with Clinton, detaching his campaign plane and the traveling press corps.

CNN story the Obama-Clinton session was “a small meeting” with perhaps just the two senators and a few aides in attendance.The New York Times said the meeting with Obama was initiated by Clinton after a daylong series of talks between their aides.There is strong conjecture Obama might pick Clinton as his organization mate for November’s presidential election against Republican John McCain.Obama has said the process would take time. Clinton, who has spoken an interest in running as vice president, sought to distance herself on Thursday from efforts by supporters to convince Obama to pick her, saying the option was up to him.

Obama, an Illinois senator, clinch the Democratic suggestion on Tuesday. Clinton, a New York senator and previous first lady, did not immediately concede but told supporters in a letter she would formally back Obama on Saturday. (Writing via JoAnne Allen; Additional coverage by Caren Bohan; Editing by Peter Cooney)

“We as black populace now have hope that we have never, ever had. I have new goals for my little girl. She can’t give me any excuse because she’s black.” KWABENA SAM-BREW, bus driver, Cottage Grove, Minn.But Mr. Sam-Brew said he would explain it to her: “I will tell her, ‘Tonight is the night that all Americans become one.’ ”Mr. Sam-Brew, a bus driver living in Cottage Grove, Minn., said Mr. Obama’s achievement would change the nation’s image around the world, and change the mind-set of Americans, too.“We as black nation now have hope that we have never, ever had,” Mr. Sam-Brew said. “I have new goals for my little girl. She can’t give me any excuse since she’s black.”In his remarks Tuesday, Mr. Obama did not mention becoming the first American of color with a real chance at being president of the United States, and, of course, most of the Democrats who had voted for him were white. But for that very cause, many African-Americans exulted Wednesday in a political triumph that they believed they would never live to see. a lot of spoken hope that their children would draw strength from the instant.

Bank in St. Paul. “We don’t need to give up at a certain level.”Alison Kane, a white 34-year-old transportation psychiatrist from Edina, Minn., said Mr. Obama’s success as a biracial politician would have a similar effect on her 21-month-old biracial daughter, Hawa.“When she’s out in, God knows where, some small town in rural America, they’ll think, ‘Oh, I know someone like you. Our president is like you,’ ” Ms. Kane said. “That just opens minds for people, to have someone to relate to. And that makes me feel better, as a mom.”But pride — in Mr. Obama and in white voters who had looked beyond race, in the view of numerous blacks — was tempered for many African-Americans by an unsettling fear. There remains a fear that race, which loomed large in several primaries and has previously been successfully in use as a political wedge by Republicans, might yet keep Mr. Obama from capturing the White House.“People hate black people,” said Michella Minter, a black 21-year-old student in Huntington, W.Va., referring to inexorable racial discrimination in the United States.

In fact, three novel York City detectives were charged in the shooting of Sean Bell, killed in a hail of police bullets on his wedding day in 2006, and were acquitted.)Mr. Obama’s moment seemed to unite blacks across the political spectrum, even those who had no meaning of voting for a Democrat for president.Mr. Obama has said that affirmative-action program should become “a diminishing tool” in achieve racial equality, and has asked blacks to understand why such programs might engender resentment among whites, suggesting that poor white children also need a boost. Although he did not cast his conquest in racial terms on Tuesday, he approved on Wednesday that it might be having an effect on other African-Americans.