As Super Tuesday gets closer, all eyes are on Hillary Clinton

Obama Barack had planned to run a TV ad during the Super Bowl.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The top presidential candidates and their big-name supporters campaigned from coast to coast Sunday, but one contender seemed atop everyone’s mind: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney contrasted themselves, and each other, with Clinton as though she were the nominee. Her Democratic rival, Barack Obama, played along to a degree, saying Clinton is so polarizing that he is their party’s better bet.

Rather than diverting the less-than-flattering attention, Clinton embraced it.

“I’ve been taking the incoming fire from Republicans for about 16 years now, and I’m still here, because I have been vetted, I have been tested,” she said in a TV interview before campaigning in Missouri and Minneapolis.

“There’s unlikely to be any new surprises,” Clinton added, implying the same cannot be said of Obama, who has been in Congress three years.

Her confidence notwithstanding, polls showed Obama narrowing the lead that Clinton has enjoyed among Democrats nationwide, even as McCain appeared to be pulling away from Romney.

With 24 states holding presidential contests Tuesday, Sunday was an intense day of campaigning and advertising, making it all the more remarkable that one figure managed to dominate so much of the talk and speculation.

For years the New York senator and former first lady has been an object of fascination, mystery and sometimes scorn by Americans, few of whom seem neutral toward her. She is the Democrat conservatives most love to hate, and McCain and Romney campaigned against her Sunday as if in a proxy battle against one another.

The Clinton fascination is trickier for Obama. He wants to capitalize on Republicans’ opposition to her without agreeing that she is the inevitable nominee.

Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation” before campaigning in Delaware, the Illinois senator said the problem is “not all of Senator Clinton’s making, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that the Republicans consider her a polarizing figure.”

Obama drew an impressive crowd of 20,000 in downtown Wilmington, but his campaign attracted attention in other places, too. It said he would air a TV ad during the Super Bowl, an expensive time slot, in two dozen states with presidential contests this month. And at a Los Angeles event, his stand-ins were his wife, Michelle, TV star Oprah Winfrey, and Caroline Kennedy, daughter of President Kennedy.

They were joined by, Maria Shriver, the wife of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who followed in the steps of Caroline and their uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, in endorsing Obama.

As usual, another prominent Clinton — the candidate’s husband and former president — was in the thick of things.

Bill Clinton visited four churches in mostly black sections of Los Angeles. The trip was widely seen as a bid to smooth over perceptions that he had injected race into last month’s Democratic primary in South Carolina, which Obama won handily.

Campaigning in a western suburb of Chicago, Romney took a swipe at Obama, again as a means of nicking McCain.

“Yesterday Barack Obama said there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between he and Senator McCain on illegal immigration,” Romney told a crowd at the College of DuPage. “I’m afraid it’s going to be real hard to win the White House if there’s not much difference between our nominee and theirs, and that’s why I’m going to make sure that we stand for Republican ideals and win the White House on that platform.”

Later, in suburban St. Louis, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a favorite of conservatives, endorsed Romney during a Super Bowl party.

“Mitt Romney is hitting his stride. He is speaking with clarity, with conviction, with the heart and the mind together, which is what conservatives want to hear,” said Santorum.

A third GOP candidate, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, struggled for attention and rejected suggestions that he step aside.

“I’ll stay in until someone has 1,191 delegates,” he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from Kennessaw, Ga., referring to the number of convention delegates needed to secure the party nod. “A year ago, nobody said I’d still be here. Look who’s still on his feet.”