January 15, 2008	Tuesday	Muharram 05, 1429

WASHINGTON: The gloves are coming off in the bruising White House battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as a race row engulfs the campaigns before their first electoral clash in the deep south.

Sunday saw some of the bitterest exchanges yet between the candidates, with the Democratic nomination finely poised heading into contests in the western state of Nevada and South Carolina.

Clinton has sought to temper Obama's electrifying oratory with a down-to-earth appeal that her hard-won experience means she is best qualified to take on the Republicans in November's presidential election.

As an example, she said a week ago that the civil rights dream of Martin Luther King only became reality under legislation enacted by president Lyndon Johnson.

Cue a furious row as African-American leaders, including some South Carolina powerbrokers, accused the New York senator of devaluing the revered King's contribution to the civil rights battles of the 1960s.

“Clearly we know from media reports that the Obama campaign is deliberately distorting this,” the former first lady protested on NBC television during a day of campaigning in South Carolina on Sunday.

Clinton said she had fought her “entire life” for civil rights, emphasised that King remained a hero to her, and accused the Obama campaign of “an unfair and unwarranted attempt” to malign her.

The row could well resonate in South Carolina, which holds its Democratic primary on Jan 26 and has a large African-American community. The state is notorious for its bare-knuckle politics.

Senator John McCain, after beating George Bush in the New Hampshire Republican primary of 2000, ran into a barrage of false rumours in South Carolina that he had fathered an illegitimate black child.

The rumours did McCain no favours among the staunchly conservative white voters of the former slave-holding state, and Bush went on to take South Carolina and the presidency.

Heading into next Saturday's caucuses in the heavily Hispanic state of Nevada, Obama and Clinton have one state each after they shared the spoils in Iowa and New Hampshire.

On a media conference call, Obama said Clinton was guilty of “an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark” about King.

“She is free to explain that, but the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous,” Obama said, denying that his campaign was whipping up black anger against the wife of former president Bill Clinton.

The freshman senator from Illinois went on to attack unnamed Washington insiders who, he said, think “it is acceptable to say or do anything it takes to get elected.” Because of his huge popularity in the African-American community, Bill Clinton was jokingly referred to as the nation's first black president. Obama actually is black, the son of a Kenyan father and white mother from Kansas.

Despite his politics of “hope,” Obama showed on Sunday that he was not about to turn the other cheek to attacks from the Clinton machine.

Accused by Clinton of inconsistencies in his record on Iraq, after her husband had attacked Obama's claim of steadfast opposition to the war as a “fairy tale,” the Illinois senator accused the Clintons of “rewriting” history.

“I stood up against the war when she was voting for it (in 2002), at a time when she didn't read the intelligence reports or give diplomacy a chance,” he said between campaign stops in Nevada.

Bill Clinton's “fairy tale” remark has also been seized upon by some African-American leaders as an attack on Obama's very candidacy, and by implication his race. That is angrily denied by the Clintons.

Further stirring the tensions was a speech at a Clinton rally on Sunday by Robert Johnson, one of the country's most powerful black business leaders, which appeared to bring up Obama's self-confessed drug use of the past.

“For someone who decries the politics of personal destruction, she should've immediately denounced these attacks on the spot,” said South Carolina black politician I.S. Leevy Johnson. Robert Johnson said he meant no such attack.

Hillary Clinton said this hard-fought campaign should not be about race or gender, but about electing a president who brings the right blend of experience and ardour for change.

Obama, she said, was “an extraordinary man, a person of tremendous talents and abilities.” On the other hand, she stressed, “You have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling.”—AFP