Obama campaign manager David Axelrod told reporters that Obama, who leads the Democratic race in raising money for his White House run, preferred to demonstrate a "common purpose to our politics rather than divisiveness and ... political point-scoring."
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Axelrod said Obama was "on the schedule that we need to be on to do what we need to do."
"We've always viewed this process as a sequential process that begins in January in Iowa and moves on to New Hampshire and I'm perfectly willing to concede the lead to her in ... September and October," Axelrod said.
As an example that an early front-runner does not always last, Axelrod urged reporters to consider the case of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who was leading the polls at this stage of the 2004 Democratic campaign and was defeated by Sen. John Kerry.
"She's the quasi-incumbent in this race," he said of Clinton. "She's 100 percent known. She's been in American politics for 20 years. She's been running for president in a de facto way for some time. So we have been catching up from the beginning, and we understand that this is a process."
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