The primary is over. Now the real race begins.

Now the real race begins.

The Democratic Party has chosen Barack Obama, and that has left Hillary Clinton with a choice. Her aides now say that she will endorse Obama on Saturday, bringing a close to her 17-month campaign for the White House. She is making the right decision: to exit this race in a way that unifies her party and begins to repair her political legacy, rather than further delaying the vital debate over who offers the vision, ideas and leadership to be the next president.

We endorsed Clinton and supported her right to fight for the Democratic nomination while there were still votes to be cast. The long and grueling primary campaigns left no doubt about the depth of her intelligence, the strength of her will and the power of her ideas.

But they left many Americans with nagging doubts about her character because the greater blame for the campaigns' negativity fell on Clinton.

If she withdraws by the end of the week and throws her considerable support to Obama, as her aides say she plans to do, she has a chance to start to allay those doubts.

It is now up to Obama to decide whether to make her his running mate, but if that is Clinton's aim, it should not be a precondition for ending this fight.

Clinton spent some time at her rally in New York on the last primary night answering the question, "What does Hillary want?" She listed important goals: Ending the war in Iraq, strengthening the economy, providing universal health care, restoring America's role as a world leader.

Those goals are not just what Clinton wants, they are what America needs. And at this point in the campaign, with John McCain trying to seem independent while toeing the Republican line on the most important issues, it is far more likely that a Democratic president would give the country a clean break from the most disastrous presidency of modern times.

For Obama, the leadership test begins with giving Clinton's backers a place in his campaign. They can help make him an even stronger candidate in what could well be a very tough race.

McCain has used the time since he clinched the Republican nomination to set the table for the fall campaign and to pin false labels on Obama: wild-eyed liberal, appeaser of terrorists. On the Iraq war, all McCain has offered so far is the same dodge Bush has employed so many times: to flip-flop between "things are going so badly in Iraq that we cannot leave" and - the more recent - "things are going so well in Iraq that we cannot leave." Obama needs to explain that that is not a strategy and then outline his own plans for an orderly exit.

There are many other issues to be debated. How is the United States going to set the economy back on its feet? How will America confront global warming and rising fuel prices?

Obama and Clinton spent the last year debating their marginal differences on these issues. There are enough real differences between Obama and McCain on virtually all of them for a full debate that truly tests the mettle of the two men competing for the presidency. The primaries are over. That debate needs to begin now.

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