Countdown to Ohio showdown

In the days leading to next Tuesday’s primary, the Democratic race is
taking on a more hostile tone.

COMBINED DISPATCHES

CLEVELAND — Maybe not since Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan met on a stage in this blue-collar city have two candidates debated with so much at stake.

And if recent campaigning is any indication, tonight’s debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama won’t lack drama.

Just a week before Ohio’s crucial March 4 primary, Clinton and Obama will face off on a dark stage punctuated by a circular red carpet and red, white and blue banners. About 1,600 people, most invited by host Cleveland State University or the Ohio Democratic Party, will watch the debate live.

“I don’t see it being as nice and cozy as the one in Texas,” said Stephen Brooks, associate director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, referring to Thursday’s largely civil debate in Austin.

Even Clinton’s supporters say she must win Ohio and Texas next Tuesday. Polls show the U.S. senator from New York leading Obama in Ohio, but the margin is narrowing.

As a result, the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has taken on a more hostile tone in recent days.

Over the weekend, Clinton angrily declared, “Shame on you, Barack Obama,” at a campaign stop in Cincinnati, accusing the Illinois senator of deliberately misrepresenting her positions on NAFTA and health care in mass mailings to voters. Obama defended the mailings as accurate.

The North American Free Trade Agreement — disliked in Ohio, which has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs to other countries in part due to such agreements — and health care are sure to be among the topics debated tonight.

“We’re going to learn a lot tomorrow night because we’ll be focusing on the issues that matter most to Ohioans,” Ohio Democratic Party chairman Chris Redfern said Monday.

Former President Clinton, campaigning for his wife Monday in rural and southern Ohio, continued hammering Hillary Clinton’s themes of reclaiming the middle class, ensuring health care for Americans and bringing troops home from Iraq.

“You cannot expect us to grow more jobs in America if we keep subsidizing jobs overseas,” he said, just hours after he had accused Obama of using campaign literature filled with “pure garbage” about her policy positions.

“A lot of the mailings sent out on her on NAFTA and health care are pure garbage,” Clinton had said during a rally at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, where hundreds of students lined up in 31-degree weather more than an hour ahead of the former president’s visit.

Meanwhile, a photograph circulating on the Internet of Obama dressed in traditional local garments during a visit to Kenya in 2006 is causing a dustup in the presidential campaign over what constitutes a smear.

The Associated Press photograph portrays Obama wearing a white turban and a wraparound white robe presented to him by elders in Wajir, in northeastern Kenya. Obama’s estranged late father was Kenyan, and Obama visited the country in 2006, attracting thousands of well-wishers.

The gossip and news Web site The Drudge Report posted the photograph Monday and said it was being circulated by “Clinton staffers” and quoted an e-mail from an unidentified campaign aide. Drudge did not include proof of the e-mail in the report.

Obama, in an interview with WOAI radio in San Antonio, Texas, said voters are “saddened when they see these kind of politics.”

“Everybody knows that whether it’s me or Senator Clinton or Bill Clinton that when you travel to other countries they ask you to try on traditional garb that you have been given as a gift,” he said. “The notion that the Clinton campaign would be trying to circulate this as a negative on the same day that Senator Clinton was giving a speech about how we repair our relationships around the world is sad.”

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe accused Clinton’s campaign of “the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election.”

The party split its share of 700 tickets to tonight’s debate between Clinton and Obama supporters to give each equal support.

“We don’t force any of the attendees to take an oath, but we do trust the judgment of good Democrats all across the state,” Redfern said.

A large number of students are expected to be among those in attendance. Many will watch from a debate party on the college’s metropolitan campus.

“There are also a lot of Democratic voters who haven’t made up their mind,” Brooks said. “They are likely looking to the debate to help them make that decision between the two choices. So the debate could serve to sway those voters.”

Cleveland as a debate setting is most famous for Republican challenger Ronald Reagan’s encounter with President Carter at Cleveland’s Convention Center on Oct. 28, 1980, just a few days before the general election and Reagan’s victory.

That debate may be best remembered for Reagan’s comment to Carter: “There you go again.”

Cleveland’s most recent debate was in October 2004 between Vice President Dick Cheney and Democratic challenger John Edwards at Case Western Reserve University. It was their only debate before the Bush-Cheney ticket won re-election over U.S. Sen. John Kerry and Edwards.