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Politics

Obama, Clinton inch toward truce

Obama sends out a plea to end the "tit-for-tat," and Clinton follows in the same spirit.

Democratic presidential rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama stepped back from a controversy over race Monday night, agreeing that a prolonged clash over civil rights could harm their party's overall drive to win the White House.

Obama was the first to try to quell the controversy that flared in the Democratic campaign in recent days, calling reporters together to say he didn't want the campaign "to degenerate into so much tit-for-tat, back-and-forth that we lose sight of why all of us are doing this."

Referring to Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards, he said that while they may have disagreements, "we share the same goals. We're all Democrats, we all believe in civil rights, we all believe in equal rights."

Clinton's campaign issued a statement in the same vein about an hour or so after Obama spoke, saying it was time to seek common ground.

"And in that spirit, let's come together, because I want more than anything else to ensure that our family stays together on the front lines of the struggle to expand rights for all Americans," she said.

Strikingly, though, one of Clinton's supporters, New York Rep. Charles Rangel, was sharply critical of Obama in an interview during the day. "How race got into this thing is because Obama said 'race,'" Rangel, the dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, said on television station NY1.

Rangel's remarks were the second critical of Obama in as many days by a black surrogate campaigner. On Sunday, businessman Robert Johnson appeared to make a veiled reference to Obama's self-disclosed drug use as a youth - although he quickly disputed that was his intent.

For all the maneuvering, Democrats are without a contested election today. Next up for the Democrats are precinct caucuses Saturday in Nevada. There, Clinton's supporters awaited a court ruling on a lawsuit seeking a last-minute change in rules they agreed to months ago. Their objective was to prevent several caucuses along the Las Vegas Strip, where thousands of Culinary Workers Union employees - many of them Hispanic or black - hold jobs.

The rules were approved in March, when Clinton was the overwhelming national front-runner. But the union voted last week to endorse Obama, and the lawsuit followed.

Edwards is campaigning aggressively in both Nevada and South Carolina, and his aides circulated a memo during the day saying both his rivals were "deeply flawed."

[Last modified January 15, 2008, 00:04:28]