Obama, Clinton plan last pitches

RALEIGH - Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton are buckling down for a final weekend push before North Carolina's primary Tuesday.

Both candidates are scheduled to return to the state today. Obama will hold a rally in Charlotte, and Clinton will campaign in Kinston, Hendersonville and Greensboro. Clinton and Obama will both speak tonight in Raleigh at the N.C. Democratic Party's annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner.

Meanwhile, the candidates' statewide organizations are working at a frenzied pace, deploying surrogates, holding community meetings, and working to get voters to the polls in the final days of early voting, which ends Saturday.

Michelle Obama is in Durham. Chelsea Clinton is in Winston-Salem, campaigning this afternoon at Salem College. The Obama campaign is holding its second rock concert in two days. The Clinton campaign is holding numerous "Hillary I Know" meetings featuring prominent Clinton supporters.

The race appears to be tightening, although the many pollsters surveying likely primary voters in North Carolina are reporting highly inconsistent numbers.

In contrast to polls several weeks ago showing Obama leading Clinton by 20 points or more, three polls out this week put Obama ahead by seven points or fewer. Another poll, by Insider Advantage, shows Clinton with a two-point lead, while two other polls show Obama with a double-digit lead.

Both campaigns and most pundits agree that the defining issue of the North Carolina race is the economy, especially the economic hardship felt by the large group of working-class voters whom both candidates are courting aggressively.

"There is a dominant issue in this election. It is increasingly dominant. It is: who has the knowledge and the leadership to turn this economy around," Geoff Garin, Clinton's chief strategist, told reporters on a conference call yesterday.

The economy is the focus of a TV-ad battle in North Carolina between Clinton and Obama. On Tuesday, Clinton started running a new ad that attacks Obama for opposing a freeze on home foreclosures and opposing a proposal to suspend the gas tax during the summer. It is the first negative ad of the campaign in North Carolina.

Obama responded with his own TV ad in which he calls a gas-tax suspension an ineffective "quick fix" and says that the country needs long-term solutions, such as higher fuel-efficiency standards and the development of alternative energy.

The proposal to suspend the gas tax -- an idea supported by both Clinton and Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee-in-waiting -- is especially controversial. Many economists, energy experts and environmentalists have criticized the idea, saying that it would not help consumers much and that it would encourage more consumption of gasoline.

"This gas-tax holiday idea -- it may be intriguing, it may be eyebrow-raising in a commercial, but it doesn't solve the problem," said U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, a key Obama supporter in North Carolina.

"What it will do is play right into the hands of the oil companies," Butterfield said. "They'll simply raise their own prices so that all of the savings go to them instead of the consumer."

Clinton aides were unable to name a single independent expert yesterday who supports the idea of a gas-tax holiday, but the aides said that sometimes a good president must take positions that are not popular among experts but that help ordinary Americans. They said that Americans need the short-term relief that a gas-tax holiday would provide in addition to long-term policy priorities such as promoting renewable energy.

Another development that caused controversy this week was a series of automated phone calls to some North Carolinians that provided misinformation about voter registration.

The president of the group behind the automated calls -- a Washington group called Women's Voices, Women Vote -- apologized Wednesday for the calls.

On the calls, a recorded voice who identified himself as "Lamont Williams" said that a voter-registration packet was coming in the mail and that people could register to vote by filling out the application and mailing it in. But the deadline to register for the primary in that manner was weeks ago; currently, the only way that people can still register is by going to an early-voting site.

The state attorney general's office said that the calls are illegal and is investigating.

Several ties between the group and the Clintons have been identified. For instance, the group's president, Page Garn­der, worked on Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, and Maggie Williams, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, used to work for the group.

But there is no clear evidence that the group intended to suppress pro-Obama voters. The group insists that its only objective is to register unmarried women to vote, and it said that the automated calls were intended to register women for the general election, not the primary. It apologized for "confusion" caused by the timing of the calls so close to the primary, and it put a stop to the calls.

■ James Romoser can be reached at 919-210-6794 or at


jromoser@wsjournal.com
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