Polls in advance of Tuesday's primaries in Indiana and North Carolina showed Hillary Clinton ahead in Indiana and getting closer to rival Barack Obama in North Carolina, where she has found growing support among rural white voters. Friday night, both candidates spoke at a Democratic Party dinner in Raleigh.
The Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner was held at the state fairgrounds — in an arena usually used to judge livestock. Friday night, it was the two presidential hopefuls who were on display, seeking the crowd's approval. And despite what's been an often combative campaign, their speeches were anything but caustic. In fact, both Clinton and Obama — as if reading from the same script — went out of their way to praise one another.
"If Sen. Obama is the nominee, you better believe I'll work my heart out for him," Clinton told the audience. "And if I am the nominee, I know Sen. Obama will do the very same for me."
If Hillary Clinton were the nominee, I would support her in a heartbeat," Obama said, "and I know if I am the nominee that she would support me because although we are campaigning vigorously, one thing that I can say is that our differences pale in comparison to our differences with the other party."
Indeed, when Clinton and Obama talked policy, they hit on most of the same themes. Both spoke against trade policies that they said are taking jobs from North Carolinians, both reiterated their support for middle-class tax cuts, and both expressed outrage at the housing conditions at nearby Fort Bragg, where a soldier's father recently taped a YouTube video showing mold, leaky pipes and other problems in the barracks.
One of the few points of disagreement between the candidates came when Clinton repeated her call for a temporary roll-back of the federal gas tax. She proposed replacing the tax motorists pay at the pump with higher taxes on oil company profits.
"That is simply the right thing to do," she said. "If the choice is between making you pay the gas tax this summer and making the big oil companies pay out of their record profits — to me the choice is clear."
Obama used some of his strongest rhetoric of the night to dismiss the gas tax holiday as "a gimmick." Noting that Republican John McCain also has endorsed the idea, Obama derided it as a plan that would save motorists just 30 cents a day for three months.
"When we're offering the same thing that John McCain's offering on the cheap that means we're not presenting a truthful response to the challenges that we face in America," he said. "We can do better than tat this time.
The vast majority of people at the dinner already had decided on a candidate before they heard the speeches. Obama seemed to be the favorite of most, in keeping with statewide polls. But one person who said he still has an open mind is Bob Etheridge, a North Carolina congressman and one of 10 superdelegates in the state who remain uncommitted. Even after hearing the candidates, Etheridge said he's keeping his options open.
"I think you want to know how your state does. You want to know how the people that you represent do, and you also want to look at what happens in America and what direction we're headed and those are the things I'll be looking at," he said.
In his largely rural district, Etheridge says he senses the race tightening — something that's also been borne out in statewide polls. Still, even Clinton's most prominent supporter in North Carolina — Gov. Mike Easley — says it's a long-shot for her to win in a state where Obama has held the lead continually since February.
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