The Los Angeles Times, the largest newspaper from the Super Tuesday state with the most delegates, has just endorsed Barack Obama in the Democratic race and John McCain on the Republican side. The paper was one of the co-sponsors of both parties’ California debates this week.

Mr. Obama, a senator from Illinois, holds most of the same positions as the paper’s editorial board — namely, being anti-war and for health care reform — combined with a “sense of aspiration.” The L.A. Times said it disagreed with Mr. McCain’s opinion on social issues but is pleased with his proposal to shut down the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The paper urged its readers to capitalize on this “historic moment” and vote for Mr. Obama in part because he opposed the Iraq War from the start. Yes, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been in the Senate longer, it said, but “experience has value only if it is accompanied by courage and leads to judgment.”

Furthermore, the editorial had harsh words to say about the Bill Clinton years:

Clinton’s return to the White House that she occupied for eight years as first lady would resurrect some of the triumph and argument of that era. Yes, Bill Clinton’s presidency was a period of growth and opportunity, and Democrats are justly nostalgic for it. But it also was a time of withering political fire, as the former president’s recent comments on the campaign trail reminded the nation. Hillary Clinton’s election also would drag into a third decade the post-Reagan political duel between two families, the Bushes and the Clintons. Obama is correct: It is time to turn the page. … No public relations campaign could do more than Obama’s mere presence in the White House to defuse anti-American passion around the world, nor could any political experience surpass Obama’s life story in preparing a president to understand the American character.

The L.A. Times characterized its endorsement of Mr. McCain, a senator from Arizona, as “sure and heartfelt”:

McCain opposes abortion and rejects the right of gays and lesbians to marry — two positions we reject. He supports the war in Iraq, whereas we see this nation’s interests better served by a prompt and orderly withdrawal of U.S. forces. But the Arizona senator’s conservatism is, if not always to our liking, at least genuine. It reflects his fundamental individualism, spanning his distrust of big government, his support for immigration reform and his insistence on a sound American foreign policy.

Mr. McCain’s dedication to changing the course of global warming and his bipartisan work on immigration — two top issues in California — also were cited as reasons for the endorsement.