Polls indicate Obama slipping in N. Carolina
Clinton castigates Wright to O’Reilly in rare Fox visit
FROM NEWS WIRE SERVICES
Updated: 05/01/08 6:47 AM
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- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigns Wednesday at a union hall in Portage, Ind.
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APEX, N. C. — North Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary race is tightening, with Sen. Barack Obama’s struggles in distancing himself from his controversial former pastor apparently eroding his once-formidable lead here.
The Tar Heel State was once seen as Obama’s to lose. But three different public-opinion polls conducted in recent days suggest that New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been reducing the gap in the run-up to the May 6 vote.
Meanwhile, Clinton, in a rare appearance on Fox News on Wednesday, said she found remarks by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. to be “offensive and outrageous” and noted that her Democratic rival had spoken out forcefully against them.
“I think that he made his views clear, finally, that he disagreed. And I think that’s what he had to do,” Clinton said in an interview with Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly.
It was the former first lady’s first appearance on the O’Reilly show, the most popular Fox News program and a staple of conservative media. Over the years, O’Reilly has been a staunch critic of both the New York senator and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Obama on Tuesday dissociated himself from Wright, his pastor of 20 years, after Wright made incendiary comments to reporters in Washington. Among other things, Wright praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and said the U. S. government may have developed the AIDS virus to infect the black community.
Campaign aides said Clinton’s appearance on the Fox News show was designed to reach out to working-class, independent white men who could decide the outcome of next week’s Indiana primary.
In North Carolina, which also holds its primary Tuesday, the Raleigh-based Public Policy Polling has found that Obama’s one-time lead of 25 points has decreased to 12 points. A
SurveyUSA poll found that Obama’s 9-point lead is now down to 5 points, while Rasmussen’s poll has Obama’s lead dropping from 23 points to 14.
Most of Obama’s loss of support has been among white voters. Pollster Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling attributes the drop to the Wright controversy, as well as campaign visits by both Hillary and Bill Clinton in recent days.
The surveys were taken before North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley endorsed Clinton on Tuesday, and before Obama repudiated Wright the same day in Winston-Salem, N. C.
Despite the bad news for Obama in North Carolina, endorsements coming in from California, Iowa and Indiana enabled the Illinois senator to pull even with Clinton in the race for support on Capitol Hill.
Obama received the backing of Rep. Baron Hill, a conservative Democrat from a critical district in southern Indiana: Rep. Bruce Braley, an Iowa freshman who grabbed a Republican seat in 2006; and Rep. Lois Capps, who has held her liberal Santa Barbara seat for six terms and whose son-in-law works for the Obama campaign.
A congressional contest that Clinton once dominated is now knotted at 97, and the New York senator continues to lose ground with the one group that can still deliver her the nomination — the party leaders and elected officials known as superdelegates.
For the Clinton campaign, the re-emergence of Wright, following Obama’s comments about “bitter” small-town voters, was supposed to be the moment when superdelegates decided that Obama could not be elected president. Instead, Obama has won more superdelegate endorsements than Clinton in recent days, whittling her once-overwhelming lead down to about 20.
On the campaign trail, Obama teamed up with his wife, Michelle, in Indiana, which also votes May 6, to court working families with a little kitchen table conversation about tax cuts. Clinton hitched a ride in a pickup truck to a gas pump to illustrate the pain inflicted on ordinary families by skyrocketing prices.
Clinton was underscoring her call for a summerlong hiatus on collecting the federal gas tax by pulling into a South Bend gas station with sheet metal worker Jason Wilfing, 33, who pumped regular unleaded.
“Sixty-three dollars for just about half a tank,” exclaimed Clinton.
Wilfing told Clinton that the high price of gas means his family won’t be able to take an annual summer trip to Lake Michigan.
The Obamas headed to Beech Grove, where they had lunch and chatted with Mike and Cheryl Fischer, hearing their stories of struggle. He’s a machinist at a local Amtrak facility where 77 jobs are threatened this summer. “They say it’s not personal,” Fischer said. “Yes, it is very personal.”
After the lunch, Obama headed to an Indianapolis park for a town hall meeting before about 30 people. He was asked how he’s holding up in light of the Wright controversy.
“The situation with Rev. Wright is difficult, I won’t lie to you,” Obama said. “We want to make sure this doesn’t become a permanent distraction.”
In Allentown, Pa., the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, said that the bridge collapse in Minnesota that killed 13 people last year would not have happened if Congress had not wasted so much money on pork-barrel spending.
Federal investigators cite undersize steel plates as the “critical factor” in the collapse of the bridge.
“The bridge in Minneapolis didn’t collapse because there wasn’t enough money,” McCain told reporters. “The bridge in Minneapolis collapsed because so much money was spent on wasteful, unnecessary pork-barrel projects.”
