Obama plans Iowa trip with victory in sight

By Jeff Mason

PORTLAND, Ore. (Reuters) - Barack Obama will make a symbolic trip to Iowa on Tuesday, revisiting the state that launched his underdog bid for the White House on a day he hopes will put him over the top in the number of delegates needed to help clinch the nomination.

The planned Iowa rally, which the campaign announced on Saturday, will take place as polls close in Oregon and Kentucky in voting the Obama campaign believes will bring the Illinois senator a step closer to defeating his rival, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Polls suggest Obama will win Oregon handily while Clinton is expected to prevail in Kentucky by a wide margin.

But the Obama campaign expects that when the results from both primary contests are added to his existing tally, he will have racked up more than half of the pledged delegates awarded in the state-by-state contests, making him the likely winner in the battle to become his party's nominee to face Republican John McCain in the November election.

"It will be (a) nice reunion with everybody who helped us get started," Obama told reporters during a stop at an amusement park outside Portland, speaking about the Iowa trip.

Obama said earlier this week his campaign would declare on Tuesday it had won the majority of pledged delegates.

Neither Obama nor Clinton will have enough pledged delegates to lock up the nomination, but Obama says superdelegates -- party leaders and elected officials with their own vote in the process -- should back the leader in pledged delegates.

The nominating contests began in January in Iowa, where Obama beat Clinton, a former first lady who was the national front-runner then and had an aura of inevitability.