February 01, 2008	Friday	Muharram 22, 1429

DENVER: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the two remaining Democrats in the US presidential race, will be vying later on Thursday over who is more capable of beating Republican frontrunner John McCain and winning back the White House in November.

For months the presidential race has run in parallel in the two parties, with candidates battling their ideological bedfellows to become the formal nominee.

But the contest has now narrowed dramatically, with McCain emerging as the Republican frontrunner and the Democratic battle reduced to a tense two-horse race.

Obama and Clinton’s face off on Thursday in their first one-on-one debate, could sharply impact how Democrats cast their votes in the potentially decisive multi-state primaries of Super Tuesday on Feb 5.

Obama, 46, has made ‘change’ the central motif of his campaign, and wants to turn the page on almost 20 years of having either a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. The former first lady is a bridge to the past, he says.

“I know it is tempting — after another presidency by a man named George Bush — to simply turn back the clock, and to build a bridge back to the 20th century,” Obama said on Wednesday at a rally in this mountainous western state.

But Democrats are less likely to re-conquer the White House “by nominating a candidate who will unite the other party against us,” he said, touching on a Clinton weakness.

The former first lady is perceived as a lightning rod for Republican discontent, and much ink has been spilled speculating that her name on the presidential ballot would mobilise Republican turnout in the Nov 4 election like nothing else.

Polls deliver somewhat contradictory projections about how each would fare in a hypothetical matchup against McCain. NBC television shows McCain beating Clinton by two percentage points (46 to 44 per cent), while the Los Angeles Times shows Clinton with a four point lead (46 to 42 per cent.)

If Obama were the candidate, he would tie with McCain, according to NBC, or lose by one point (41 to 42 per cent) according to the LA Times.

In the last Democratic debate, Clinton asserted that she was the Democrat most likely to triumph in November, as a veteran of 16 years of Washington political battles and due to her greater foreign policy experience.

“I am better positioned and better able to take on John McCain or any Republican when it comes to issues about protecting and defending our country and promoting our interest in the world,” she said last week in South Carolina.

“The way to win a debate with John McCain is not by nominating someone who agreed with him on voting for the war in Iraq,” Obama shot back on Wednesday.

Clinton, he added, also sided with McCain “in voting to give George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran,” and like him embraced “the Bush-Cheney policy of not talking to leaders we don’t like.” Republican presidential hopefuls talk about Hillary Clinton as the candidate to beat in November, and they have made the necessity of routing her a rallying cry.

McCain accuses her of wanting to “raise the white flag of surrender” in Iraq, handing a victory, in his view, to the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

“Frankly, she is so out of step with the American people,” former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney charged at last week’s Republican debate, saying he “can’t wait” to face off with Clinton in the general election.

“I frankly can’t wait, because the idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House with nothing to do is something I just can’t imagine,” he said.

Americans want a president and not “a team of husband and wife thinking that they’re going to run the country,” he said.

The American right has never forgiven Hillary Clinton for her failed 1993-1994 attempt to reform the US health care system, nor for her handling of Clinton-era scandals, which she chalked up to a right-wing conspiracy.

—AFP