| |
| |
![]() |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
GREENVILLE, North Carolina : New polls gave Hillary Clinton fresh hope on the eve of two primaries on Tuesday which will shape the end game of her gripping White House combat with Democratic foe Barack Obama.
The rivals raced through a frenetic dawn until midnight campaign swing in Indiana and North Carolina, which hold primaries on Tuesday offering Obama the chance to finally knock Clinton out, or for her to ignite a comeback.
"This is going to be exciting tomorrow, because I started very far behind," New York Senator Clinton said on CNN. "I think we've closed the gap."
Obama, 46, who leads in Clinton, 60, in pledged delegates, and nominating contests won, seems to have a mathematical lock on the nomination, but appeared resigned to battling on until the bitter end of the primary calendar.
"The last contest is on June 3, and so, I'm pretty confident that we will be competing in all those contests, and Senator Clinton will be as well," Obama said on NBC.
"I think, at that point, everybody will have voted, and we will be in a position to make a decision about who the Democratic nominee is going to be."
A new USA Today poll out Monday found that Obama, vowing to become America's first black president, had been damaged by the fallout of racially tinged remarks by his former pastor Jeremiah Wright.
For the first time in three months, the former first lady led her rival in the survey of national Democrats, by seven percentage points. Two weeks ago before the latest storm over Wright hit, Obama was up 10 points.
A CBS/New York Times poll on Sunday however suggested Obama had started to recover from the Wright furore, giving him an 11-point lead over Republican candidate John McCain, 51-40.
Last Tuesday, that hypothetical match-up had been tied. Clinton led McCain in the same poll by 12 points.
Another poll, by Suffolk University in Indiana, showed the New York senator leading Obama in the rust-belt state by six points, 49 percent to 43 percent.
"It's no slam dunk but Hillary Clinton is poised to win (Indiana)," said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Centre.
Obama leads in North Carolina, where Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton have been campaigning feverishly.
A Zogby tracking survey had the Illinois senator up by eight in the state, much lower than the 20 point lead he had enjoyed in some polls just weeks ago. Zogby had the race in Indiana a mathematical tie.
Analysts say Clinton needs take the midwestern state, where she was due to return later Monday, to at least to halt a flow of Democratic party support to Obama, and stay in the race.
She boiled her campaign speech into bullet points of her resume in her first two events in North Carolina, implying Obama was too inexperienced to meet economic and foreign policy challenges.
"We have got to have a president who goes into that Oval Office next January 20, ready, prepared and able to lead from day one," she told supporters at a railroad station in High Point, as freight trains rumbled past.
She also hammered Obama for rejecting her idea for a temporary moratorium on gasoline prices, which he says would save most Americans less than 30 dollars, and is simply political pandering.
"I believe we should start standing up for the vast majority of Americans who are paying these outrageous gas prices," she said.
Obama was up with the lark in Indiana, at a construction site, canvassing the kind of blue-collar voters who have sided with Clinton in past contests and frustrated his attempts to clinch the nomination.
Clinton's camp admits she can't overhaul Obama in the count of pledged delegates who will formally anoint the nominee at the convention in August.
So she is pinning her hopes on a collapse in Obama's support, hoping to convince party bosses, or superdelegates to conclude the Illinois senator cannot beat McCain in November.
Clinton's communications director Howard Wolfson predicted Tuesday's contests would show a "real tide" moving in her direction, arguing that the New York Senator had closed large polling deficits with Obama in both states. - AFP/de
|
