COLUMBUS (AFP) -- Democrat Hillary Clinton vowed to fight all the way to the White House after she checked rival Barack Obama's momentum in Ohio, while Senator John McCain captured the Republican mantle Tuesday.

""You know what they say -- as Ohio goes, so goes the nation. Well, this nation's coming back and so is this campaign,"" Clinton, 60, told her adoring supporters as confetti rained down on her victory rally here.
""The people of Ohio have said it loudly and clearly, we're going on. We're going strong. And we're going all the way!"" she said, hammering Obama as too inexperienced to confront national security and economic crises.
However, Obama's campaign had stressed that whatever the final outcome of ""Super Tuesday II,"" Clinton faces an uphill battle to overhaul his lead among the Democratic delegates who will choose the party's presidential candidate.
With more than half the precincts reporting their results in Ohio, Clinton enjoyed a commanding lead over Obama of 58 percent to 41. In the Texas primary, Clinton led 50-48 with just over than half of districts reporting.
Capping an extraordinary political comeback after his campaign looked down and out in mid-2007, McCain beat former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in all four of the day's primaries -- Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island.
The victories took McCain, a Vietnam war hero who is distrusted by many conservatives for his maverick stance on issues such as immigration, over the Republican winning line of 1,191 delegates.
With a Democratic nominee perhaps still months away from being anointed, the Arizona senator laid out his lines of attack for November's presidential election.
""And I am very pleased to note that tonight, my friends, we have won enough delegates to claim with confidence, humility and a sense of great responsibility that I will be the Republican nominee for president of the United States,"" McCain told cheering supporters in a Dallas hotel.
Former president Bill Clinton said last month that Ohio and Texas were must-win states for his wife to sustain her dream of following him into the Oval Office.
But Hillary Clinton's campaign massaged expectations to turn Ohio into her firewall to douse the Obama blaze, accentuating her economic plans in a state ravaged by industrial decline and where feelings against free trade run high.
In Texas, the day-long primary was being followed by election caucuses in a quirky two-step process that was engulfed in controversy.
Obama's spokesman Bill Burton shot back: ""This is a transparent and laughable attempt to divert attention from the caucus results, which reward delegates every bit as meaningful as do primaries.""
According to RealClearPolitics.com, before heading into the latest contests Obama led by 1,392 delegates to Clinton's 1,279. The winning line to secure the White House nomination is 2,025.
A total of 370 Democratic delegates were at stake on the biggest day of primary voting since ""Super Tuesday"" on February 5.